Find Your Gmail Contacts in orkut
It's not clear whether the fact that Gmail automatically adds to the address book all the people you've ever sent messages makes it irrelevant or comprehensive. It's not clear whether orkut will ever become a respected social network in other places than Brazil and India.
Context & Ripple Effects
Business Week's October 2007 profile of orkut's global ambitions framed Google's social network as a worldwide play; this feature quietly supplies the mechanism. By letting users locate their Gmail contacts inside orkut, Google connects the two products it fully controls — and because Gmail auto-adds everyone a user has ever emailed, the resulting contact pool is simultaneously comprehensive and uncurated, exactly the ambiguity the write-up flags.
The catch is geographic: commentary at the time notes orkut never earned respect outside Brazil and India, so the Gmail bridge matters most where the network already has density — and least in the US market Facebook was consolidating.
First-order effects
- Orkut users with Gmail accounts get their entire sent-mail history surfaced as findable contacts, converting years of accumulated correspondence into one-click friend candidates without any manual importing.
- Gmail's auto-populated address book becomes a distribution asset for orkut: every message ever sent is now a potential social-network invitation surface.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks that depend on manual invites or third-party contact imports face an incumbent that owns both the mail client and the network, letting Google seed connections at zero acquisition cost.
- The auto-add behavior cuts both ways for orkut's reputation problem — a fuller graph, but one padded with one-time correspondents, which risks diluting the engagement metrics advertisers and press judge the network by.
Third-order effects
- If email address books harden into the default social graph, competitive advantage in social networking shifts toward whoever controls the mail layer, making contact data a strategic asset rather than a sync convenience.
- That same consolidation sets up the next fight over whether users can move their contact graphs between services — a portability and privacy question regulators had not yet touched in 2007.
The trend: Social networks are beginning to treat the email address book, not user-entered friends, as the canonical social graph — an advantage that accrues to whoever owns the mail client.