Google Removes E-mail Export Functionality from Orkut in Hopes of Stemming Mass Migration to Facebook

What happens when one of the principles you champion starts contributing to your downfall? “Ignore your principles” appears to be the answer Google is ascribing to in its latest step to try to save Orkut from being overtaken by Facebook in India and Brazil.

I recently noticed that Orkut’s contact exporter tool has taken away users’ ability to export their contacts’ e-mails – probably the single most important use case for the tool. The tool still works and lets you export things like name and gender, but the e-mail address is now conspicuously absent:

So what is likely to be the reason behind deliberately crippling the feature? Stemming a mass migration of users from Orkut over to Facebook, facilitated by Facebook’s friend import tool that has caused a good deal of controversy to date.

If you haven’t been following the drama, back in September Facebook started aggressively promoting, to Indian and Brazilian users, a friend importer tool that facilitated Orkut users to recreate their friend graphs over at Facebook. The move helped accelerate Orkut’s decline at the hands of Facebook in both India and Brazil – Orkut’s biggest strongholds, and two very strategically significant countries.

Now this is where the story starts looking more like a Bollywood or Latin American novella. A few days after the Orkut exodus began, Orkut’s contact exporter coincidentally broke, and after the inconvenient “bug” was widely reported, Google proceeded to fix it.

However, Orkut’s “fix” was in fact a severely handicapped feature, with a user interface that included additional steps and poorly design flows (confirmation buttons hidden below the fold, difficult to share URLs, etc.). This may seem trivial at first glance, but for anyone that has done any UI testing, you know how these usability ‘mistakes’ can lead to dramatic user failure rates in accomplishing the desired task.

Apparently the UI handicap wasn’t enough to slow down determined Orkut abandoners from figuring out how to export their data. So, what did Google do? Completely removed the ability to export e-mail addresses from Orkut.

Google’s move is a practical one, but one that flies in the face of the “Data Liberation Front’s” ra-ra-ra about users being "able to control the data you store in any of Google's products," pretty much discrediting that group’s credibility. It also flies in the face of some of the public comments Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made about not trapping user data. What the move seems to have Google saying is basically that data portability is something they support… as long as it’s convenient and to our advantage.

Follow me on Twitter | Subscribe to The Daily SEO Tip |