Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet

Jeff,

I agree with your argument to some extent, but it simply comes down to usability. Sure, as a web-savvy computer geek, I could go get my own hosting, set up a blog, set up a photo gallery, maybe code my own shoutbox in PHP, etc, and use the internet to let people interact with me publicly. But the average everyday user isn’t going to know how to do this in a million years. Facebook takes all of those things and aggregates them into one coherent application and makes it easy to use, so that anyone can use it without the least bit of technical know-how. This is why Facebook isn’t doomed.

Also, if Facebook wasn’t a walled garden, at least providing some sense of privacy, nobody would use it because simply sharing all kinds of information about yourself on the wide-open web is pretty scary for most people. People want to be able to control this access, and Facebook provides this.

hey sucker, everyone thinks you’re wrong

One tipping factor is spam. For many people, checking their email has gone from being a positive experience (“let’s see who wrote to me today”) to a negative experience (“better go clean the spam out of my inbox”).

While this may change with FaceBook given that they’re “opening up” their platform, today, if I have something in my Inbox on FaceBook, it’s a real message from a real friend. There’s some serious value in that.

Finally, somebody just said it. And I mean Jeff, not the rest of you. :slight_smile:

What a bunch of little girls.

I’ll be they have petty squabbles, form up teams, and a bunch run off to start a new hive around a newly elected “queen” every 3 to 6 months too.

People go where their friends are (especially kids who are the main users of many of these sites), and, crucially, with what they know about.

This was true for AOL and it’s true for Facebook/MySpace/Linkedin/Livejournal/DeviantArt/etc… You need to gather a lot of knowlege from disparate sources and do some hacking in code and on the server if you want to replicate the features that those sites provide immediately.

I only go along with LinkedIn because from time to time I bet on following the masses.
But I do not particularly care for the site whatsoever.
To illustrate the point : one of my recommendations is from Bill Lumbergh.

Your argument that blog/websites can/should replace tools like facebook is a ridiculous one. Say I have 400 “friends” (yeah, sure, I probably don’t care about half of those people). No one is going to try and “index” each and every site from 400 people. And then trying to visit 400 sites in a day? Sheesh. Besides, look at livejournal… blogs are 99% worthless information.

Facebook on the other hand allows those 400 people to quickly see me and I them. All at one domain. And some of the features work more like a friend RSS feed. (When I broke up with my girlfriend, I had 3 people call me the next day thanks to facebook… good or bad I thought that was fascinating). I’ve also been invited to 3 wedding of people I care about but don’t see very often. Those people probably would not have tried to search the vast interwebs to find my personal website in hopes of getting my contact information.

Any tool that helps people stay in touch with friends is okay in my book. It’s not really social networking as in new friends but social network maintainance.

I thought these things were silly and for kids until I tried Facebook about a month ago. It’s really a well done application, and is a great way to quickly check in on people. It’s about convenience and getting things done. Blogs are different beasts entirely. There’s no way that you personally could scale to the # of readers that you have on your blog - it’s much more of a publishing medium aka newspaper + letters to the editor than a social networking tool.

I agree with much of this post. However, there are some, such as LastISawYou.com that help friends, parents, families, etc. find each other again, particularly when first name and/or last name are not known. Some of these do provide a service.

Humans are tribal and like to mark out territories. The social networking sites are just one more way of doing these things. Owing to constraints on my time, I appreciate the ease of use of these services, so my thanks to all you mysterious coders who have done the work already, enabling me to get on with what I need to do.

Durrr. If you have to sign up to see anything then it is not public. Imagine if you had to sign up to blogger to read blogs, or to wikipedia to read articles. It is all well and good using it if you want to keep your info tightly controlled, but for people who are using it for open, social reasons then it is counter-productive.

I disagree. If it’s freely available to the public, which facebook and linkedin are, it is absolutely a public service. Something private would be where you have to pay a fee to use services. Facebook, like flikr and blogs, is totally free for users.

Also, please explain why I need or want someone (for example, you) to be capable of seeing my personal information? In what odd, alternate reality does you seeing my personal information constitute a “social reason” to have facebook be open? And how is it counter-productive that you can’t see my personal information?

Answer: it isn’t. I neither want to have a social bond with you, nor would I want you to be able to browse my personal information.

Using facebook or linked in is pretty simple: you’re trading your personal information for the services provided by the two sites.

You are 100% right !

Many times, i’d tried many social network. But at least, it’s nothing to me, i found nothing from it. look like, I just tested new site, new interface, it was my curious.
Thanks for the post
nXqd

I’m really not sure if I get what you’re trying to say. That limiting applications to a scripting language rather than turning over mounds of private data to whoever wants to write their own code is bad? That attempting to supplement – not replace – the internet is doomed to failure? That flickr and twitter are a good ideas, but putting them together in is a bad idea?

Help me out here. Back when facebook was hard to join, you might have had a point; now that it takes less effort than signing up for email, I’m really not sure where you’re going with this.

When given a blank piece of paper and told to do anything with it, people block. They can’t think of anything. Give them some constraints, a place in their mind for bubbles of thought to form.

A completely open internet is a blank piece of paper. A “Walled Garden” can get people thinking so they can create new and interesting things.

Walled Gardens may be dead ends after all is said and done, but they’re so necessary for creativity, we keep creating them over and over.

I heard the hype about facebook and decided to take a look. Then I discovered I would have to sign up to even see anything at all. Yeah right. Same with “become my friend to read my blog”. Why the hell should I have to sign up to anything to read a blog or look at someone’s profile?

Social networking sites are for morons. I have no qualms in saying that at all. If someone is my “friend” they can give me their email address or skype id. I do not need a list of all my friends. If I need a list to remember who my friends are then there is something very wrong with my definition of that word.

Public services on the web, such as blogs, twitter, flickr, and so forth, are what we should invest our time in.

What makes you think facebook isn’t public? This seems like a very nitpicky distinction: calling blogs, twitter, and flickr “public” while facebook is somehow “private” makes almost no sense to me at all.

For what it’s worth, I love facebook. I’ve been using it for a few months now, and it’s fantastic–it allows me to link with friends and family and keep a tab on what they’re doing, where they are, and so on. It’s a really great tool.

That being said, I wouldn’t ever want it to be public, because it’s personal information. I don’t want random people on the Internet to know where I live, who my relatives are, what my current phone number is, and so forth. It’s private information for totally obvious reasons to anyone who doesn’t like having a google search of their name reveal rather personal information.

I also think linkedin fits into the picture quite well; I’m fine with potential employers knowing my job history, educational background, etc, but I’m not fine with them contacting friends and relatives, and seeing pictures of me on my family vacation, and so on. So the divide works well: linkedin is business. facebook is personal. Neither of them are even the slightest bit similar to AOL, although you seem to think otherwise.

ok, i’ve been reading this post for hours staring at the picture and i still can’t find waldo… why can’t i just get what i want from your system?

Instead of seeing the “walled garden” sites as lock-in models for proprietary data storage, you just have to see them as just an another interface. While you might not have your entire digital life stored in your facebook account, you can still use a facebook account to link up with other more casual-use internet friends and even link them back into your ‘own’ service.