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05.16.07
Fenced Commons or Walled Gardens?
 By
Shel Holtz
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my friend Dan York’s May 2 post asserting that the Web is fragmenting into a xxxx of walled gardens.
Dan’s obviously given this a lot of thought himself. Recalling the walled gardens of online services like CompuServe, Dan sees currently popular services like Facebook and LInkedIn as a return to the likes of these services that silo’d its participants within its boundaries. Email symbolized the walled gardens: CompuServe members could only email other CompuServe members; someone with MCI Mail could only send a message to someone else using the same service.
But a funny thing happened along the garden path… the walls started to slowly break down. UUCP started interconnecting UNIX systems. FidoNet started linking together BBS systems. X.400 came out and had corporate interest. And then along came SMTP, which ultimately became the “one email protocol to rule them all” (paralleling the emergence of TCP/IP and the “Internet” as the dominant network in the midst of all the network walled gardens).
One current trend finds us using other channels than email for messaging. Users of these services—Skype, Jabber, AIM and the like—can only engage with others using the same services. Messaging is also occurring on the message boards of individuals with profiles on social networking services, which are often (but not always) limited to people who have accounts and are able to log in to those services. Each of these, Dan says, is “a messaging world unto itself...We’ve gone from the closed communities of email services to the complete openness of Internet e-mail and now seem to be returning back to those gated communities.”
I have expressed my own concerns about the explosion of social networking sites. Like Dan, I wonder how many of these networks one person can possibly participate in meaningfully. One person could belong to a network for his car, his profession, his hobby, his medical condition, his favorite singer, his favorite genre of books, his favorite baseball team/football team/basketball team, his religion, his field of study...how much time could he devote to any one of these? And if the answer is, “Not much,” how vibrant a member of any one community can he be?
Still, I’m not as concerned by this as Dan is.
Dan’s point about one open email account as a source of communication versus several discrete, isolated services is a valid one. But despite the fact that email is open, it is also hugely ineffective, one reason it has been dismissed by the younger generation in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, and social networks.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
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