Facebook has been getting a lot of press lately - one discussion item that caught my eye was a number of blogs and discussions around whether Facebook can thrive as a  “walled garden” (which refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (click here for the Wikipedia entry).

The main issues raised were the viability of a walled garden on the internet, the pluses and minuses walled gardens - both for the provider and for the consumer (you can find an interesting discussion at http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/06/walled-gardens-.html). Most of the examples talk about AOL and how it failed as a walled garden, as did cellular providers that tried to limit WAP access to only certain sites.

I am not sure I actually understand the point - since the the whole internet is just sets of walled gardens - how many websites let you use thier information freely. Very few have comprehensive (or any) APIs, more have feeds that give you limited access to the information actually available. So how is Facebook any different?

One key difference is that opposed to most sites - Facebook has collected your own, personal information (or that of your friends). People want to be able to do with their own information whatever they please. So I think the right analogy isn’t the AOL walled garden approach, but rather something even more “ancient” - the client server revolution  of the 80’s. For years after GUIs and PCs were available it was still very hard it was to get your own organizational information out of various legacy systems to use in new applications. Even though the information was yours  - you couldn’t get at it to use as you like - either because the vendors couldn’t keep pace with the emerrging technologies - or didn’t want to (so they could keep it “hostage”). This gave rise to an imperfect, but usable technical solution that let people get at their information even though the system didn’t have the capability - a whole new set of “screen scraping” technologies that emulated users to get the  desired information out of applications.

So I think that the same will happen here - either the walled gardens will open up or  people will figure out to get at it some other way.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Integration, Mashup, Publishers, VC, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.