Derivadow

Last year the buzz was around MySpace now its Facebook and before that Friends Reunited and Linkedin. I have to confess that I’ve never really grokked these services – I’ve played around with them a bit – but generally never really got that much out of them. Preferring to stick with email, IM, Flickr, del.icio.us and my blog.

The problem I’ve always faced with community sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, is that I’m never sure I want to maintain yet another online presence. I know that they provide tools to help bootstrap the site with data about your group of friends (importing contacts from your email account etc.) but there’s more to it than that. And in the back of my mind I know that all too soon there will be a new site out there doing more or less the same thing but with a twist that grabs everyone’s attention. And the reason this is a problem is, as Steve Rubel points outs, because they are walled gardens.

Despite the age of openness we live in, Facebook is becoming the world’s largest, and perhaps most successful, walled garden that exists today…

The problem, however, lies in this fact – Facebook gives nothing back to the broader web. A lot of stuff goes in, but nothing comes out. What happens in Facebook, stays in Facebook. As Robert Scoble noted, it’s almost completely invisible to Google. You can share only a limited amount of data on your public page – as he has here. That’s fine for many users, but not all.”

Walled gardens create barriers to getting information in and out of their system. This means that I know that I will need to go to extra effort to seed the site with information about me and my network; maintain duplicate information between different gardens as well as in the wild; and have difficultly getting data out and into something else. Walled gardens will always eventually die because they require that extra bit of effort, both from their community and, more widely, the developer community. As Jason Kottke notes like AOL before them Facebook’s walled garden approach places additional strain on the development community.

What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously… imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.”

[what's needed is]…Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.”

In other words we already have the platform – its the internet, in its raw, wild, untended form. And rather than trying to build walls around bits of it we should keep our content in the open, in applications such as Flickr, WordPress (other blogging software is also available) and email. But tie it all together into communities with technologies such as OpenID the “open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity” and Friend of a Friend (a project aimed at creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do).

Indeed this approach is similar to that adopted in Plaxo 3.0 which now runs as a web service removing all reliance on Outlook. Plaxo now provides a synchronization and brokerage service between applications (e.g. Outlook or Apple’s Address Book) and services (AOL, Google) – your data is no longer within a walled garden but you do have access control over who can access your data.

Facebook is an amazing success – but like all walled gardens will eventually either die or be forced to open its garden gate and let the rest of the internet in (for example, let me replace the Facebook’s status application with Twitter, or Photos with Flickr). And in the meantime I’m happy to stick with my existing online presence.