Mapping social butterflies
[ Digital Life ]


Online social networking seems to be the buzzword nowadays when it comes to activities on the internet. With a host of websites offering services that would connect you to your friends, family, co-worker, distant acquaintances and people you might have met at your childhood summer camp, such as Orkut.com, Friendster.com, MeetUp.com, Hipster.com and Facebook.com, and as most of these services are offered free of charge, it makes one wonder: what is in it for the entrepreneurs behind the social networking sites? What kind of a business model are they following? But most importantly, if the firms operating these websites are offering their services for free – and some of them, like Orkut.com do not even show advertisements either – how do they generate their revenue? How do they cover their costs? And at the end of it all, what is in it for them?

Taking a look at how online networking websites work, all that an interested user is required to do in order to sign up, is to fill out a detailed and lengthy online application in which he or she gives details related to what his or her home address and phone number is, which industry does he or she work in, what are his or her primary interests and hobbies, where did he or she go to school and so on. Websites like Orkut.com even go as far as to inquire about your political interests. In short when signing up, you are surrendering quite a bit of information about your personal, your professional and your social life to a firm, you don’t even know. A quick look at the ‘Terms of agreement’(who reads those anyway?) of these services reveals a clause that states that the information a user is so willingly typing away in the form will be used within the organisation and it’s affiliates, however, it will not be revealed or leaked outside the organisation and its friends.

The next step after filling out the registration form is to ‘invite’ say around ten to fifteen friends who would be interested in using this service as well. After you have painstakingly typed out all of the e-mail addresses of the ten or fifteen friends you could think of, now you are free to use the service, after of course, you verify your e-mail address. Phew.

As of this moment, not only can you use the social networking service and be a part of the ‘hip’ online crowd, but the website knows almost everything useful there is to know about you – including who your friends are. For those of your friends who are interested in staying in touch with you (and others) and signing up for the service, they would have to go through the same process of signing up, giving out information, inviting more friends and verifying an e-mail address. The mechanisms of the steps just mentioned work just like an evil (read: annoying) chain e-mail.

In turn the website keeps collecting more and more information about its users. And the information keeps on growing to include more and more people all the time. The information collected by these social networking websites is perhaps more comprehensive than any marketing survey ever conducted on such a humongous scale and in short would be any marketers dream.

Taking Orkut and how it works for example; what separates Orkut from other social networking websites is that an interested user cannot just ‘sign up’ for the service; he or she has to be ‘invited’ so that at the end of it all, Orkut becomes a growing community of ‘trusted individuals’. Being invited to anything feels good, and if a user knows that the only way to avail a service is by invitation only, he or she will feel like he or she is part of an exclusive group, or an online fraternity of Orkut-ites, if you will. This way Orkut can ensure that there are at least two individuals on Orkut who know each other, that these are ‘real’ users and that their social network can be closely monitored to observe the trends in their social interaction with other users online. With currently no ads being displayed on Orkut, and being an affiliate of Google, and since they are not allowed to leak out your information outside the organisation – ruling out the possibility of selling user information to marketing firms – how does a social networking website like Orkut, generate revenue?

The answer, when it comes to Orkut, is quite simple. Google being the one of the popular search engines, dedicated to organise the information that the online world contains, it has in short, millions of users – but it doesn’t know anything about them. With the online world within its grasp, Google did not have a user database through which to know what kind of users use their services the most. In waltzes Orkut, the answer to all of Google’s user-database problems and provides it with a plethora of information about what people like, where they come from and who their friends are.

You have to be living under a digital rock, if you didn’t know that the mastermind behind Orkut was Orkut Buyukkokten – yes, Orkut was named after him. Buyukkokten, after joining Google, developed Orkut by working on it once a week, as is a requirement of all Google employees that they devote at least one day a week to their personal projects. The day that Orkut was introduced on the internet, their system collapsed because more users then expected signed up for the service. Furthermore, Google owns all of the technology developed by its employees, whether it is in the time devoted to their personal projects or not.

Now that Google has all of the user-information that it needs and more, it can introduce more customised searches in order to accommodate its users – and its advertising clients. But how will it know which user is searching what? By integrating all of its Google e-mail accounts with its Orkut accounts. That way, they know for sure whether the person searching for a recipe for a Chicken Tandoori is really you or not. Note that when you are signed into your Orkut account and you open another window, of the same browser, and click on Google.com, your Google e-mail address is displayed prominently in the upper right hand corner of the browser window. Yes, they (read: Google) are watching you.

At the end of the day, don’t be surprised if while logging into your Google e-mail account, you see a text-based ad for ‘Chicken Tandoori’ recipes by XYZ organisation, playing right above your e-mails in your Google e-mail inbox. Nothing comes for free, not even your e-mail account or the online social-networking service you signed up for, you pay for it by giving up every ounce of privacy you have online and letting an organisation spy on every move you make (or don’t make) in the World Wide Web.

First Published:
Spider
May 2007