Walled Gardens and the Lesson for Social Networks

Gramercy Park, New York, New York by Dmadeo

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A few weeks ago during the Edelman New Media Summit, Jay Rosen (as usual) said something incredibly wise. He equated the media - and essentially other walled gardens - to New York's Gramercy Park. Leah Jones, my colleague, eloquently captured Jay's remarks...

"Gramercy Park is a beautiful, soft, manicured park in the city.  It is the best park, luxurious and green. Gramercy Park is gated.  Only the wealthy people who own property around the park are allowed to access it.  What would happen if NYC raised the capital to buy the park and take the gate down?

 

It would get dirtier.  There would be more people.  It would be harder to police.  There would be graffiti.  There would be more crime.  Gramercy Park would no longer be Gramercy Park."

Rosen went on to add that the gates are already off the media's Gramercy gates. Openness is thriving and so the old rules no longer apply. And that's difficult for people to contend with because the park is no longer pristine.

Over the years we have seen time and again that open systems trump closed loops. Back in the 1990s. Windows beat out the Mac operating system, in part, because it was more open and it ran on all kinds of hardware. Later on, AOL was toppled, for among other reasons, because web browsers and broadband connections liberated the most valuable content inside the walled garden.

Today, open systems are continuing to thrive. Wikipedia is growing in import because we can all edit it, not just a select few. Google, Amazon and countless others offer powerful APIs that allow developers to add value with their own creations. Openness wins time and again.

That leads us to social networks and, in particular, Facebook. (I should preface this by adding that Edelman represents MySpace.)

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

Most social networks (which I am characterizing here broadly to also include sites like Flickr, Vox, del.icio.us and digg) let you determine what you share with the general public through Google vs. what you only share with your circle of friends. This level of flexibility is a win-win for everyone. If you don't want to share anything you don't have to. On the flip side, if you're a voyeur, go for it.

For all of the excitement around Facebook and its application platform, it's essentially a giant walled garden. You can embed virtually anything you want inside Facebook. Just like open APIs, Facebook's developer program lets anyone create value in the ecosystem.

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.

To thrive, all social networks need to enable the community to create value. Facebook gets a big check mark there. However, they also need to give back to the web. Usually this isn't an issue. When you give back to the web, you get a return in Google Juice. So it's unclear why Facebook to date remains a walled garden.

Can walled gardens continue thrive in an era of openness? Can a social network be social even though so little of the community's value is visible to the outside world? Facebook is writing this book as we speak.

Comments

[Paul Chaney]

I agree. Having just recently set up a presence on Facebook, I am a bit disconcerted about the fact that it is a walled garden indeed and frustrated that there isn't more of a public presence. I suspect this level of privacy has to do with the fact that Facebook was once only the purview of high school and college students.

[marshal sandler]

The add music feature on face books is excellent and user friendly ! It can grow a great garden with a little imagination !

[Ryan McKegney]

I don't think AOL is the best analogy, although it's very popular all of a sudden. The problems AOL had were multi-fold, but perhaps the largest is that they were charging money for a (slow) walled garden when the open garden was better.

As Steve points out above, there are advantages to having a walled garden. In real life, I have a public and private life, but because of Google and the general openness of the web, the balance between public and private online is out of whack. The existing "private web" (IMs, email) has been largely static for the last half decade, but if it chooses to be, Facebook could be the next evolution of the private web. Facebook isn't just a walled garden, it is MY walled garden.

[Chris Rossini]

I think it all depends on the type of information located inside the walled garden.

Facebook contains lots of personal information that people place there with the understanding that it won't be shared with the rest of the Web.

Having the option of sharing everything about your Facebook profile on the Web is a problem because it involves other people (i.e., your friends) who may not want it shared.

I think Facebook has got it right so far.

[Bernard Goldbach]

At this juncture when training first year college students in social media, I'll accept the constraints Facebook places on spawning information globally because some of my freshmen would be mortified later by how they appear inside a global social network now. I can see the circles of friends I have on my mobile phone, through RSS feeds and by using a scripted routine that harvests my newsfeeds and outputs a PDF so at least in my use case, I get to see what I want to monitor.

That said, I also despise data silos. So I know I'm a bit hypocritical here.

But I don't think Facebook has failed to give back anything since its willingness to permit developers to address its APIs shows it has provided a hook into the Facebook ecosystem to people who want to generate some information and even monetise the result.

[Adolfo]

Social doesn't mean "for all the inhabitants of the world"... I like that the others they know that I belong to a group. I like, even, that they know the reason why I belong to that group. But This doesn't signify that I want to show what I share with my colleagues.

[Greg Brooks]

Google juice is *one* coin of the realm, but not the universal standard -- 24+ million users and 100k new sign-ups a day puts the company in the "doing just fine" column, even without a lot of Google presence. Walled gardens may not be perfect for social networking, but, if you have enough people crammed into the garden, they work just fine for the bottom line.

Building something that's starting to look a bit like a web-based OS? (Hellooooo, open API!) You don't necessarily want a lot of spider-facing infrastructure but you *do* probably want to create a framework for variable, user-controlled exposure of information to the web, to friends or to other interested parties. I'd bet Facebook is heading down that path.

Analysts are valuing the company in increments of $1 billion. Someone sure thinks they're doing things right.

[Steve Bryant]

Facebook remains a walled garden because exclusivity creates demand. Privacy also creates demand, and privacy creates a sense of community. Hence Gramercy Park is an excellent example, but not for the reasons Jay Rosen posits.

Take Jane Jacobs' example in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the signature work of urban planning in the last half-century. Jacobs on Gramercy: "Since it is blessed with splendid trees, excellent maintenance and an air of glamour, it successfully provides for the passing public a place to please the eye, and so far as the public is concerned this is its justification...parks do their job well when they do it beautifully and intensely, not perfunctorily."

If we're going to continue with the urban planning/social network analogy, I would suggest that Facebook and Gramercy Park both be noted as extremely successful, extremely high value destinations. Neither suffer from what you're calling the burden of locked gates.

[JudyJ]

Having grown up two blocks down from Gramercy Park - and played within its gates for many years - I am amused by Jay Rosen's remarks. Of course, there were rich families on the park! Yet, there were also many, many poor ones - who enjoyed the Park, too. (Of course, the rich families weren't too happy about it.)

In any event, I understand the impressions he has on which he bases his assumptions about elitism and wealth and gates. But his are false assumptions, which lead to an even more misleading cliche. The reality is much more nuanced and vibrant - which is the same for Facebook.

[Jerry]

Hi, Steve:
Walled gardens in a mass, collaborative Web 2.0++ is a flawed proposition, long-term. Short-term, it means war. For example, the USA is in a two-party system that emerged from many parties, over time. Therefore, competition is good; may the strong survive. (Laissez faire on the 'Net.)
As long as users/contributors and everyone else are allowed to 'vote with their feet', the best is yet to come!
JerryWFranklin
www.BlueSkyBrothers.com

[Linus Kendall]

Hi,

Interesting post - great reading your blog!

As a heavy user of Facebook I'm actually quite sad that they're not open or doesn't give me the opportunity to share what I do on facebook into the rest of my personal online webspace (includign my prescenses at flickr, youtube, etc.etc.). It means that the content I have on facebook is only available to a small part of my network and that have made me more and more reluctant to post things exclusively to facebook (rather I have to adopt the behaviour of ALSO posting to facebook).

I belive that you're right - they need to open up their garden in the long run (with feeds, open profile pages etc.). However, as another commentor notes - right now people are voting in favour of facebook and their closed community - in my network a HIGH percentage are online on the service, which means that I have less need to expose some of the things that I do on facebook.

However I disagree that Facebook creates exclusivity - right now it's open to all and there is certainly now feeling of exclusivty (rather of ubiquousness).

Brs,
Linus

[Luiz P.]

I really like the postings of Jeff Atwood. Did you guys have the same idea in practically the same time?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000898.html

[Jeremy Pepper]

Don't hurt yourself thinking too hard over this one, but what isn't a walled garden online?

MySpace is a walled garden. You join, you cannot leave but you have to abandon. You cannot port your information from there.

Everything online is a walled garden, but there are some options of taking SOME of your data and going.

[Virgin]

I now realize that yes, social networks are walled gardens. You upload your images, videos, information, and are not able to download/transfer it to another network. How something so vast can be so limiting . . .

[whetdigest]

This question is worth digging a little deeper. I will preclude by saying that I've done a lot of academic and quantitative analysis of social networks and its relationship to brand equity. In addition, I worked at Netscape and AOL, and especially around user membership so I might have a thing or two to say...

First off, is it really that difficult to understand why Facebook is a Walled Garden?

Let's take a single stab at it from different viewpoints. First off, I'm not arguing the correct/incorrectness of how/why things are executed but felt compelled to provide some real world examples.

Facebook: It is in their benefit, especially at this stage, to keep their community walled so they can best monetise on their user data. I've not found many companies to willingly fork over their user information. This is not particular to the web but also any other business. Google may _seem_ open but the truth of the matter is, the bulk of data cached by Google was not produced by Google. They act as an aggregation tier. Try asking Google for user data such as profile information, frequency of logins, demographic data NOT related to search activity. I would be very surprised if they part with that information. Or, better yet, go to any Food and Drug retailer and ask them for their user data, purchase history, etc. Even large partners to these companies lack transparency to user data. It's frequently delivered as aggregate information.

Users: From a user perspective, some people may not _want_ to be searchable, cached, etc. As an example, there is a large contingency of folks who believe that their user of my information, even if it is not resold in some manner is flattery in its purest form. It is not. Republishing of such content, be it personal data or IP against one's wishes and especially without appropriate credit falls under plagiarism in the academic sense and direct violation in the legal sense. As I've asked in the past... "Do you watch Cable/Satellite TV? Do you pay for it? Do you resell it?" IP is IP and it's easy to see why some may want certain restrictions.

Sociological: Let's explore the meaning of a community and what makes one more successful than another. In researching the strongest communities, historically, families tend to be the highest ranking. With the decentralised family units (a worldwide trend, even within milli old Nomadic tribes), friends have shifted higher in ranking. It is the commonality of a group which typically defines it as a successful community and provides a sense of exclusivity.

As for the AOL analogy, one of the biggest downfalls was not so much the internet's "openness" but AOL's inability to adapt to change quickly enough. Ironically, the features that initially made AOL (and CompuServe) so successful also limited their growth. Initially, these types of services provided a quick an easy way for people to connect with each other. As the internet grew and became easier to use, the newer generation skipped AOL and went straight for the lower cost not to hard to navigate alternative.

The really interesting thing to note about AOL is not the slow reaction time to the internet. The interesting thing about AOL is to not how LONG they were able to hold their market position (we're talking pure revenue numbers here, not brand equity) whilst the internet boomed. Here's a little sample. In the late 90s, AOL still had 31 MILLION paying members. Why the hell didn't everyone abandon ship and go to a free service? There were plenty of them. MSN was one (failed) that offered free services similar to that of AOL. (note: AOL used CompuServe as a fighter brand to offset that threat) One big reason why people didn't leave was their attachment to their email addresses, buddy lists, chat rooms, etc. People didn't leave because of the online community that was created there over years and years. It's true, it was seriously sub-sexy to be an AOL user at the time. It was, in effect, the "dating ugly" syndrome. People were sneaking around so their friends don't find out. On the home front, most Netscapers threatened to quit if forced to give up the Netscape email addresses (yes, I was one of those snobs!).

Also, look at just about any David vs Goliath scenario. What starts off as a smaller organisation is always more nimble or it simply will not survive. The larger organisation responds by resting on its laurels, has major issues in mobilising its forces, or suffers political infighting at the least opportune time.

I know it's easy to take broad strokes of association, but if we take the time to dig a little deeper, some of these things are not so surprising, just a repeat of history. Frequently, it's even a repeat of history in the same sector.

cheers,
Mi

[Jacqui Graham]

A walled garden exists because of its walls, and because of the limited number of people permitted to access it. Take away the walls, remove the restrictions, fire the gardeners, allow unlimited traffic, and we have two possibilities:
1) the garden is trampled, nobody looks after it, and it eventually turns into a vacant lot
2) the garden is lovingly cared for by volunteers and the restrictions necessary for its continued survival are honoured by all

I like Facebook precisely because it is a walled garden. While my MySpace account is regularly threatened by spammers, mass marketers and jerks, and my Tagged account is targeted by sexual predators, my Facebook account remains pristine. Nor am I at risk from the insane decoration one-upmanship that has taken over MySpace, to the point where it is impossible to read the information on a page because of the flashing, pulsating, glittering, or just plain busy backgrounds. On Facebook I can choose to ignore invitations to add widgets allowing me to throw friendship balls or sheep, poke or tickle, become a pirate or a Ninja, or leave glitter graphic messages on my friends' Super Fun Walls. At the same time I can keep in touch with close friends and casual acquaintances, knowing our information will not be all over the internet tomorrow.

The World Wide Web needs walled gardens, quiet oases where we can catch our breath and enjoy a picnic lunch, knowing our cameras and notebooks and children are safe - if only for a moment.