My personal opinion of Gmail and Orkut is that it is a a feeder into a huge marketing database they are developing. In fact, I believe it they ever decided to combine the data from orkut and gmail into one database, they could charge whatever they wanted for it because marketing companies would happily fork out the dough for it.

Think of it: Orkut allows google to see who your friends are and some interests.
Gmail: allows google to see what you and those friends are *really* interested in.

Who wouldn't pay hand over fist for that type of detailed marketing data?

My personal opinion of Gmail and Orkut is that it is a a feeder into a huge marketing database they are developing. In fact, I believe it they ever decided to combine the data from orkut and gmail into one database, they could charge whatever they wanted for it because marketing companies would happily fork out the dough for it.

Think of it: Orkut allows google to see who your friends are and some interests.
Gmail: allows google to see what you and those friends are *really* interested in.

Who wouldn't pay hand over fist for that type of detailed marketing data?
But the privacy terms would be breached and class action suits would have the stock trading at pennies.

OK. So they don't give out names and email addresses....there is still a *lot* of infomation they can dig out of those two entities that any marketer would be happy to pay big bucks for.

The thing that makes me wonder about these entities is that they are both started with the same model: give a few people access and watch how by inviting others they grow the database. It just screams 'experiment' to me...they are watching the behavior, and I honestly wonder when they are going to sell the information to the highest bidder.

What the invite only screams to me is smart marketing. In sales, one of the most effective techniques for closing deals is "taking away the sale" and it's been used by top pro high end closers for ages. Somehow, the thought of not being able to have something increases the demand for it. Something like young girls playing hard to get when dating.

As far as what they can mine from those venues, it has great value that it's doubtful any search company would ever be willing to part with. With Gmail and Orkut you've got an abundance of natural language usage that's untarnished by optimization techniques, so it would be invaluable for keyword mining and semantics data where natural language patterns are concerned.