Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet

Well said. And thank you for a legible catchpa!

ā€œFacebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If youā€™re not a Facebook user, you canā€™t do anything with the site. Nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesnā€™t index any user-created information on Facebook. All of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Maybe we shouldnā€™t be so excited about the webā€™s future moving onto an intranet.ā€

Iā€™ve had the same uncomfortable feeling about web-based message boards. Prima facie, the walled-garden model violates the principle that information wants to be free.

Think of how Fidonet helped to open up the insular world of BBSs. Think of how Usenet was designed to be inherently inclusive (just start a news server on a Net-connected machine and all its users instantly join the ā€œconversationā€) and eternal (because decentralized). Now, Usenet is irrelevant to all but a tiny online subculture, BBSs are dead, and the traffic that those media would have borne is now happening on Web-based message boards, whose owners can edit content, forget to pay for their server space, or shut down for good at will, and whose content (more important) is essentially invisible to Google unless you know the secret password (the URL of the siteā€™s archives). Balkanized again!

Another applicable simile might be to the shift from the open dissemination of information and knowledge in the classical period (at least if you werenā€™t a slave) to the locked, guarded libraries and monasteries of the Middle Ages. Obviously we need a Renaissance to happen, but is Web 2.0 it? Iā€™m not convinced (yet).

Great insight. Itā€™s too bad that the hype around Facebook Platform obscured that theā€™ve built a really great experience for their users.

Thousands of sites are struggling to gain users for their little service with little hope of succeeding. Facebook sets a great example for exposing these applications within their site and bypassing the signup tax for using them.

I donā€™t believe Facebook is the new internet, but I sure like the little world map on my profile that shows where Iā€™ve been. Thatā€™s cool.

using the same idea of metaphors, let me give you one i had:
the early days of the internet was a walled garden used by some geeks.
out of this walled garden came the web as we know it. so Facebook is a walled garden that will open up, while at the same time keep its ā€œsemi-privacyā€ that attracts people to it.
steps in this direction are the SumbleUpon.com and last.fm facebook applications. these apps bridge the gap between the 2 networks and facebook, which is something i think every other networks will do, so that facebook turns into a mega-network monster

Late to the party, but thought Iā€™d comment on some of the people advocating the ā€œprivacyā€ of facebook. In a way that warms the cynical cockles of my heart.

I found it quite amusing that the supposedly private information posted on facebook by itā€™s users, typically by college kids, stuff that they really wouldnā€™t to be public at all. Pictures and information of them being drunk and stupid, etc. ended up being used against them by the institution that defined the scope of their privacy.

Or more amusingly, by interns for corporations tasked to scour facebook for dirt on that person. What happens on Facebook doesnā€™t stay on facebook. (see this wikipedia article with references, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook ). So itā€™s like the worst of the open internet, people who might know you finding dirt about you easily because of the self-selected environment. I mean they donā€™t even have to search to the 3rd page of results on google!. So be wary of who might be spying on you in that walled garden, since they might know you and not be your friend.

http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/09/social-networki.html

ā€“
All this brings me back to the title of this post. As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else (which is why I like Ning, which suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts).

Instead, I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. Iā€™m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but Iā€™m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

i couldnā€™t have done a better article, youā€™ve said all the things iā€™ve been telling my friends, kudos to you fella!

I can appreciate the privacy argument and I can appreciate the friend-of-a-friend networking, but I canā€™t get behind the vendor lock-in.

Jabber and email doesnā€™t lock me in to a specific company, why should non-public foaf-stuff?

Iā€™ll never get a Facebook account.

I wonder if the author has heard of OpenSocial?

I agree with you about Facebook - it is too general and sucking in otherwise available apps from the Internet seems goofy at best. Do I really need another pseudo file system to hold all my crap? No.

On the other hand - social networks with a specific purpose are great - specifically LinkedIn. I have ammassed 680 REAL associates and colleagues I have worked with. I am a marketing guy - it is my job to talk to lots of people. I recently got laid off, went to LinkedIn and posted my status: Rob is looking for a new gig - within two days, I was flooded with real tangible opportunities that I am currently interviewing for. Most people without a job I know feel like they are doomed to hell until macroeconomics improve - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I have the luxury of a rich LinkedIn network and will likely end up being unemployed for a net of three days. So, a well purposed social network (like any other tool), when used properly, is a great asset.

Rob

Wait a secā€”are you trying to say that Twitter isnā€™t a walled garden? Identi.ca has since demonstrated otherwise.

yah wonderful

What about all the people who want a much higher level of privacy for their pics and everything, and only want friends to see? Thereā€™s no easy way to do all that with friends in the wild using blogs and all. Lots of people want walled gardens.

You can always write a post for me to refer to, thanks!

By this logic it would seem you think instance messaging apps should go. Private groupings have a deserved place. I see it like when there were BBSā€™sā€¦ they pretty much were gobbled up by the internet. But I for one miss the one I used. It isnā€™t the same without it. Facebook is the internetā€™s version of a BBS.

What I think is scary is the illusion of privacy that sites like Facebook give. People really think they are safe by posting whatever they want on Facebook. Especially the younger genreations, who are posting their entire lives on these walled gardens.

Reading this for the first time since you posted it on twitter tonight.

While the sentiment definitely resonates with me (I am opposed to walled gardens as well, despite having facebook and linkedin accounts) I think alot of these walled gardens are moving in the right direction via standards-compliant open APIs, such as OpenID, OAuth, microformats, and REST-based web services. This isnā€™t the same as being truly open web, but at the same time it brings some structure to otherwise chaotic content. The fact that these APIs are present and that services are interacting with eachother means things are much better than in the AOL days of old.

pfff

What amazes me is not that people are fickle (when it comes to social networking, thatā€™s understandable), but that they feel it necessary to rationalize their new fascination by claiming that the current state of the art is truly revolutionary.

Facebook doesnā€™t really let you do anything you couldnā€™t do before. Neither does AJAX, or the iPhone, or Ruby or the WPF. They might offer some incremental improvements over the old low-tech methods, slightly more convenient ways of doing the same things you used to do, but itā€™s always a marginal improvement and never an explosion of better living or productivity.

You folks saying you werenā€™t interested in SN until Facebook, please just admit that it has nothing to do with the technology or convenience, and everything to do with crossing the threshold of popularity from being part of an obnoxious fad to avoiding social isolation.

Steve-O: Unfortunately direct communication is pass for a lot of people. One of my friends has planned her entire wedding through Facebook - not a single paper invitation, phone call, or e-mail sent out (except the automated Facebook e-mails). I still have no intention of joining - Iā€™ve politely told her that I cannot read the ā€œmessagesā€ I keep getting alerts about and that if they pertain to me, she should tell me personally. Not surprisingly, whenever I speak to her about it, she doesnā€™t even remember what their content was; thatā€™s how little thought goes into the ā€œsocializingā€.

I think the main attraction of social networking (in contrast to the BS rationale that people try to feed us) is the opportunity for pure unabashed laziness. Instead of doing the hard work of remembering or maintaining peopleā€™s contact information, deciding whether or not something should be interesting/important to them, and actually, you know, keeping in touch, they just slop everything on their Facebook and assume itā€™ll reach whoever itā€™s supposed to. And it often does, hence the popularity of those services.

Quaint that social networking does such a stellar job of eroding real-life social networks. Is this the Facebook ā€œcultureā€ I keep hearing so much about? No thanks.