The mission statement of the Google data liberation front reads as follows: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.”
However it seems that all this was nothing in the prospect of losing consumers. Sometime back ago face book launched their export tool, which enabled users of Orkut to export their contact information including their email ids to facebook, however as soon as this happened, the feature developed a bug, which according to Goggle happened as they were upgrading the feature to offer enhanced security.
When the feature came back, users were in for a surprise, the feature had everything but the email ids, i.e. You could export a plethora of information but not the email ids, hence making the tool completely useless.
The official stand of Google on this is “Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file… “
The concerns of Google are right on this one as the growth pattern of a social networking site is exponential and not linear, i.e. even if we compare the stats that Orkut had 4 million page views last month & Facebook had 5 million page views last month.
The information is actually useless, since it is the multiplier which we are concerned with FB 2009 = FB 2008 x 3.28 O 2009 = O 2008 x 1.35 So, Facebook definitely is going to take the lead, unless something happens extraordinary and knocks it off.
However there is more bad news for Orkut, you can now easily integrate your Orkut account with your Facebook profile courtesy a new Orkut app for Facebook that’s not developed by Google but an Amazon employee.
The application does more than just exporting contacts, it lets a facebook user access his/her Orkut account via Facebook, and do everything one could normally do with your Orkut account. The application is already having more than 2000 users, and looks on to becoming a huge hit, guess it is time Google did something otherwise it is bye-bye Orkut.