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.

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Over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate the power of search engines as a source for highly-qualified traffic on the web, and for the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) in helping engines properly find, index, and rank your content. At Experience Project where we receive millions of monthly visits from organic search results, we have tried to institutionalize SEO knowledge and best practices, and in doing so, I’ve developed a series of ad hoc training materials and resources for getting employees up-to-speed on SEO.

Today, I’m launching The Daily SEO Tip, a blog / website with the goal of sharing some of the key SEO lessons we’ve learned firsthand, as well as the countless others we’ve learned from talking to others. If you work with the web in any capacity, you need to know about SEO and I hope that The Daily SEO Tip will help you do that as well as share with us what you learn from your own practice.

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I’d appreciate it if you check out our site and try out subscribing for a bit. Hopefully you’ll find it of great value, and if you don’t, please let us know how to make it better.

What About Monetization?

I found it interesting that I decided to write about user acquisition before writing about monetization. I wonder if I’ve internalized the (in)famous Silicon Valley mindset of build it first, monetize second that has both worked and failed in the past.

One of our investors, Mike Maples, has impressed on us that it takes an innovative business model to create a truly revolutionary company. For example, Google not only created a breakthrough product but it also implemented an innovative business model (the keyword bidding system developed by Overture – remember, you don’t have to be the inventor, you just have to assemble the right pieces together!). You can contrast that with companies like MySpace, YouTube, or Digg that have very hot products but applied old business models (display advertising) and came out with very successful companies, but no Googles or ebays.

I think there are also some companies out there that have tapped into very novel ways to monetize, but have not become revolutionary companies because their product simply does not have the mass appeal of a Google or a MySpace or an Amazon – remember, you need both sides of the equation. A few examples are IMVU and Gaia with their venerable ability to monetize virtual goods and economies.

There are also a number of other success stories of companies that found a great monetization match for their product. These include companies like LinkedIn which seems to come up with new ways to monetize every day, most recently surveys / market intelligence, but let’s not forget their enviable subscription business. It also includes another class of enviable “monetizers” – those that mint money by forming a market – ebay is the classic, but more recently Apple’s success with iTunes and the AppStore shows that this model is alive and well if you can pull it off. Finally there are companies that actually make money by selling real goods (no!) – there are the classic examples of Amazon and Zappos, but also some more novel e-commerce plays like Zazzle (customization) and Threadless (crowd-sourcing).

So, when all is said and done, what’s the right time to figure out your business model? I think every company needs to have a business model figured out from inception, but not necessarily the business model. Some path to becoming cash flow positive needs to be apparent, but not necessarily a path to a revolutionary business model. A revolutionary business model does not come in a eureka! moment but instead is the result of careful and deliberate testing and iteration, always aiming at hitting a unique insight that forms the base for a breakthrough.