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Posts Tagged ‘google-contacts’

Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”. Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut’s friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends’ Email addresses.

In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph.

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“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. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.”

Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.

Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort.

It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t.

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EventVue, a company that builds online communities for conferences in order to improve conference networking amongst individuals, has launched a new product called Discover designed to help conference attendees find friends who are attending the same event. The goal of Discover is to work with different companies’ APIs, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Contacts, and Yahoo! Contacts, to help identify matches.

Discover is a simple widget that conference organizers can install on their sites to showcase an event’s speakers, sponsors, and attendees. It’s currently in private beta testing, and only selected conferences are using the widget on their sites, according to a company blog post. It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn’s API is a private API that only a handful of companies get access to, and EventVue was one of the companies given access to the API.

EventVue Co-Founder Josh Fraser says that the product can actually help get more attendees to visit conferences, explaining:

“Over the past 2 years, we’ve heard from conference organizers that their biggest challenge is getting people to register for their conference. These conversations have had increased urgency in the past year as the economy has brought a lot of cuts to conference travel.

We heard this enough times that we finally decided to do something about it. EventVue Discover helps conference organizers market their events and get more butts in seats. We learned from talking with organizers that the most effective way to market an event is to get attendees to encourage their friends to attend. Discover lets attendees see who they know is attending a conference from their social networks and makes it easy to invite their friends.”

EventVue was part of the inaugural batch of startups under the TechStars incubator program, and offers direct integration with some of the largest online ticketing services Eventbrite, RegOnline and Acteva.

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One almost surefire way to find if a new feature is on the verge of launching is to dig through code. That’s exactly what led to finding a reference to something called “Magic Inbox,” in Gmail. But what is it? Well, it could just be another one of those nifty, but small new features that Google loves to roll out in Gmail Labs at breakneck speed. But there’s a chance it’s something much, much bigger.

Specifically, Google Operating System, which did the digging, believes that the feature likely is a way to sort your Gmail inbox by your social graph. The two references to “friends” in the code, seems to lend some credence to this. Presumably, this would allow you to better filter your inbox based on if you have specified the emailer as a contact. As someone who gets bombarded by email everyday, most of which is not from people I actually know, I would weep with joy if such a feature were implemented. And so would my mom, as she may actually get emails back from me were that the case.

Of course, others have been working on this same idea as well. Yahoo has been saying for a while that it wants to use your inbox as a part of your social graph. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been working on things in the area as well. But given all the work Google has been doing recently to tighten up its social graph across its huge network of services, a social filter in Gmail could be very, very useful.

Users are likely to have security concerns about this as well. Some people want their email client to be completely private and not a part of the social graph. Of course, Google has already been using Gmail as a key starting point for your social graph for a while now, even if you didn’t realize it. Well over a year ago, Google it rolled out its social features to Google Reader, pulling in who it thought your friends were based on who you emailed in Gmail.

This proved to be an awful idea as people you email aren’t necessarily your friends. Google eventually rolled out several updates to this feature to allow users to better tailor their relationships. And that would obviously be a key part of a Gmail social filter as well. You need to be able to separate out your actual friends from those who you simply have contacted in the past, or maybe even correspond with a lot.

While Google hasn’t exactly nailed the social features, it’s pretty clear that the company is thinking about them — a lot. And that your Google Contacts, which started as a part of Gmail, but have since been spun out, are a key part of it.

Google I/O, its large developer conference is taking place next week. Google is likely to use the event to unveil some key new things it has been working on. Could that be a “magic inbox,” which is also called “icebox inbox” in the code? We’ll be there to find out. Maybe Gmail will even leave beta — but probably not.

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