Learning with the Fang

My last few blog posts have hinted at this pattern forming in my brain around the need for a switch of defaults from CLOSED to OPEN in a range of things related to the Web. My frustrating experiences with my wifi enabled mobile phone have been a catalyst for a whole range of related thoughts. Over the next few months I want to share some of these thoughts out loud in this blog, and will try to remember to include the CLOSEDvOPEN tag in the title. With a bit of luck, someone more eloquent than me will see the patterns, describe them better and push this important conversation forward.

Laurel Papworth has already started doing this with relation to my grumblings about FaceBook feeling like a walled garden to me - first HERE and now HERE. It all started with my posting a QUESTION in FaceBook - is FaceBook a Walled Garden? (Which you can answer via my profile).

FaceBook feels very ‘Walled In’ to me because I find myself having to go to FaceBook.com just to find out what’s new. It is the only part of my Web2.0 universe that I cannot manage effectively in my beloved RSS Aggregator. Here are a couple of example thoughts:

• Why is there no orange RSS button for every single item in FaceBook that generates a list. (Especially the ‘MiniFeed’ - hello - a feed without a feed!!) Furthermore, it would be cool if every facebook app automatically inherited this behavior from the underlying platform. Better still, some facebook UI to help manage, mash and remix a growing multitudes of (full not partial) RSS feeds of information flowing out.
• What’s with those teasing e/mail notifications which tell you something has happened, but force me to go to facebook, then click around some to get what should have been delivered via RSS to my aggregator (and sitting inside the e/mail in the first place). Like this one: Mike Seyfang See how Laurel Papworth answered your Question.
• When I joined FaceBook, why did I have to create yet another online identity, profile, then add friends one by one. Why couldn’t I have used my OpenID, said ‘grab my profile information from HayStack, plug into my network of friends from flickr, twitter and mySpace, invite everyone from this OPML file to join me and then start looking for new friends’ inside facebook?.
• Like Dave Slusher, I am pretty much over ‘repeating the work’ of joining the latest shiny new community online. The next one I join will have to leverage some of the work I have done in the past.  (You know the meme - standing on the shoulders of Giants).
• and now for the consipracy theory stuff:
• What others are calling the hotel california syndrome - can I really never delete my profile and all associated data?
• what is lurking in those terms and conditions if I make the killer app that really does drive people away from facebooks social graph?
• why did I feel dirty when I created a popfly mashup to pull information out of facebook (what was the fineprint on the T&C’s I accepted on getting my application key?)

Now, Laurel’s first post that I linked to above politely points out the difference a walled garden and a gated community. Fair enough, if Laurel can give me a better handle to describe what I have been banging on about, I will use it (walled garden is overloaded and used too loosely anyway). But, there is a bigger issue than choosing the correct term - Laurel calls it the ‘Web2.0 burst‘ - and I will talk more about that later.

Laurel’s second post claims that FaceBook is NOT a walled garden - bollocks!! It is, is, is and is. She’s wrong and I’m right. Well, sort of. The point she makes is that at the moment there are more ways to get stuff into FaceBook than out of it, but that is beginning to change and likely to swing the other way in the future. She has even created this FaceBook group to keep track of (all 3) applications that pull data out. Now even if people write a squilion more really cool apps, (and the facebook team doesnt do evil things to them) it will probably be too little, too late to prevent the Web2.0 apocalypse that Laurel predicts. Here’s why:

• People will have to do a whole bunch of work to add and configure the apps that provide functionality that should be part of the platform in the first place.
• The work to add all the apps, and the work required to make them perform useful work just contributes to the inevitable atrophy of which Dave Slusher speaks - one day people are just gunna stop because the work of joining all these communitiies actually prevents us from spending more time with those we love (either online or offline).
• Until we see some robust services which enable us to build on the work done in each community we join, and to provide continuity of service when our favourite site goes away (or changes its terms of service, or just goes out of fashion) we are sitting on a time bomb for what Laurel calls the Web 2.0 burst (or bust or boom). Think about it - what will happen when a few key sites with large chunks of our identity, work, fun, portfolio, even lives - goes away.

The antidote to all the evil things mentioned above requires a flip of defaults - from CLOSED to OPEN - which is substantially different to a bit more openness or a few more apps.

Here endeth the lesson.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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