History repeating itself: Facebook as AOL 2.0?
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Facebook, MySpace and other social networks are basically the second coming of AOL. The term “walled garden” pops up a lot, usually with a derogatory meaning. With the sheer volume of buzz lately Facebook has been a popular subject. A few days ago Steve Rubel linked to his coworker Leah Jones’ blog about a comment that equated the media to Gramarcy Park. Gramarcy Park is the quitesential walled garden:
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 wealthly 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.
The web, like everything else, is subject to the pendulum-like swings. At first websites were very distributed and usually available only to the very geeky. Along came AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. They made the online world accessible by crafting a careful and friendly user experience. Eventually the world wanted more features and less hand-holding. People migrated away from these services to the fullness of the Internet. For the longest time AOL tried to keep their gates shut, but that didn’t keep people from leaving. Years have gone by and opinions are changing yet again. Now with so much of peoples’ lives being conducted on the web there’s just too much to keep track of, too many different user interfaces to navigate and people just want to manage their lives simply. They’re tired off all the dirt, graffiti and crime. They want a single source to manage their social life.
I find it very interesting that the people who espouse the wonders of GTD and feed aggregators don’t recognize that many of these social networks fulfill the same needs. Where many use RSS for blogs and news, Facebook functions very similar and arguably better for social uses.
Why better you say? Because it lets them manage their identity (and identities). They don’t have to deal with the lack of support for authenticated feeds. They don’t have to worry as much about who is looking at their photos or reading their posts. They can track who has access and they understand that the Internet is not a safe place. Not everyone believes that the fullness of their life should be broadcast to the world. Pageviews and ‘Net-reputation don’t have the same lure to those outside the A-list and wannabe A-List bloggers. Best of all it limits the sheer number of random accounts and passwords they have to remember. Remember UselessAccount.com? Facebook also helps you identify others as well. Spam and phishing problems are vastly reduced. If I receive a message from a friend, then I’m pretty sure that they’re actually the one that sent the message. I don’t have nearly so much confidence in email.
As Dare says Network Effects Mean Walled Gardens are Here to Stay:
To me it seems pretty obvious why the average person would want to to use one application for managing photos, blogging, IM, reading feeds with updates from their friends, etc instead if using half a dozen products. Especially if the one product fosters a sense of community better than any of the other individual products does on its own. Of course, I’ve said this all before in my post Why Facebook is Bigger than Blogging so I won’t repeat myself here.
Facebook succeeds because it automatically provides all of those applications for a user without them having to hit 10 different websites to provide the same functionality. There are certainly a lot of people that prefer an integrated suite over best of breed. By using a platform like Facebook I don’t need to manage the links between those services for myself or the hundreds more from my friends. It all just works and becomes even more useful as more friends begin using it. All of that is presented in a much richer interface than most feed readers.
If Facebook is a walled garden then it definitely exploits one of the genre’s best qualities by providing a consistent user interface. Unfortunately many of the new applications diminish the clean utility of the Facebook layout but it’s still better than learning to navigate Flickr, random blogs or worse MySpace profiles.
Facebook really as “walled” as AOL was? You don’t have to pay for access thanks to the wonderful world of advertising. You’re also not being denied access to the fullness of the Internet. Facebook lives inside of the envelope. The fact that everything doesn’t bleed into Google is a good thing. It may reduce some of the richness but for most users that’s a welcome trade-off compared to losing their job or having too much of their embarrassing “private life” publicly recorded until the end of time.
I think it’s unfair to dismiss Facebook entirely as useless closed-system. It certainly tries to offer a good number of the benefits of an open system balanced with the advantages of a well-designed and easy to manage information hub. It is true that once your information goes in that it may never come out… but perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug. It may just be me, but the aforementioned pendulum seems to be swinging faster these days. It’s quite possible that Facebook will recognize the value of completely open systems and learn from AOL’s mistake of not adapting quick enough. Time will tell.
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