“We Are Not Influenced By Facebook Or Twitter!” – Rahul Kulkarni – Product Manager – Orkut.com
We reviewed the new orkut platform yesterday and now we bring to you an exclusive interview with Rahul Kulkarni – Product Manager for Orkut. WATBlog spoke to him about the reasons for the change, the competition pressure, Orkut’s future and more.
Q: Reasons for New Orkut?
A: About a year and a half ago we started thinking about how will social networking evolve in India? Earlier there was just google and orkut in India but today there is google, orkut, picassa, youtube, facebook and twitter as well.
We did some research with our users and got the following insights:
1) Users Care About Conversations NOT pages – We realized that users don’t care if they have one page to go to or several pages as long as their conversation seemlessly continues from one platform to another.
This made us question – Can we cross product integration between orkut, gmail, youtube etc.
2) Orkut is more about personalized conversations than status updates Orkut is closer to email than twitter is and What orkut users care about is the 10-15 people who matter to them and quality conversations with those people.
Based on these insights we revamped the frontend and built it with Google web toolkit which is also used to build Google wave.
Second investment we have made is in backend to add algorithms which work on knowing who matters to you. Friend suggestions is one such feature that we have worked upon. As orkut is a google product we use your Gmail contacts data to recommend friend suggestions on orkut.
Q: Are you influenced by Facebook and Twitter?
A: Not really many features are standard across many social networks. What we are trying to figure out is the balance between personal scraps and status messages. We are currently experimenting with status messages and taking feedback from our users. Some initial feedback from our users is that status updates confuses them as they aren’t sure what to use it for.
The idea for status updates is more inspired from Gmail and Gtalk status updates than from Facebook. We found that these updates on gmail and gtalk were really popular and were curious to find out that is that the same user on orkut or its a different user with a different state of mind.
We are figuring out how to merge gmail, gtalk, youtube and orkut to give a seemless experience to our users.
Q: Is competition like facebook and twitter leaving you behind?
A: I cant comment on facebook and twitter numbers but our numbers interms of both active users and conversations is very healthy. We have 30 million conversations via photo comments and scraps each day worldwide. We also have 80 million users who log into orkut atleast once every month.
Also I feel orkut is touching a very different USP compared to the platforms you mentioned. Our USP is around personalized conversations.
Infact we are also very popular on mobile and millions of users from India are using orkut via mobile. Our userbase is very young and his age ranges from 18-24 years and this segment is the largest segment on orkut.
Also contrary to popular belief our last year growth was the fastest growth ever. (Rahul did not comment on whether the growth was in the number of users added or interms of % growth over existing base)
Also growth in all Tier I, II and III is almost the same.
Q: Did the open platform of Orkut in 2006-07 hurt its reputation?
A: In 2006-07 both orkut and its users were immature and hence there was misuse of the platform in terms of spam and fake profiles. We battled this problem on multiple fronts via an algorithm that curbs malware attacks and spam and interms of fake profiles we came up with default filters that made users photos and scraps secure.
Q: Which is the topmost activity on Orkut today?
A: No.1 is Scraps (which also includes photo comments)
No.2 is photo uploads
Q: What features have you rolled out for advertisers and brands?
A: We have been working with brands to make their advertising more integrated to the social networking platform. For eg with a recent client we integrated their ad with an open social application which led to several users engaging with their brand.
Similarly we have also launched a new feature of orkut promote which lets users promote stuff via their profile. This is where we are seeing interesting content being generated. We are working on making the ad slot less of a blind spot by showing interesting content that makes users engage with that spot. Currently orkut promote is a free tool for users.
Q: What new features can we expect from orkut going forward?
A: Orkut Groups is where the next innovation is coming soon and everyone should watch out for that.
Q: Which competitor is the biggest threat to orkut?
A: To us the biggest threat is a new startup working in a garage somewhere making the next level of social networking which the current lot of guys have never even thought of.
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Mr Rahul Kulkarni,
I loved reading your interview but not so pleased to read the last two answers. Without developing the orkut community interface what makes you think of starting something new like orkut groups? well, I am nowhere to ask you like that but It makes me and many of orkut users sad to see the declining edge of orkut today. You should believe in the fact that the mass need strong relations, continuous engagements, community building and resourceful content generating more than scrapping hey I want to make friendship with you and sharing photos of bollywood hotties.
Since 2004 till now I think Indian internet users are mature enough to accept something like twitter, facebook and foursquare but orkut is still far behind it.
Last, why you feel threat with anyone, you are Google the god of internet, you are the one who made gmail buzz a new age social networking. But why you are detaching orkut with it?
As a loyal orkut user here is my only friendly advice : Save orkut communities, people are migrating on facebook so give some option to transfer their community from orkut to facebook. Yes I sound foolish but for Google everything is possible