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.