Too much face(book) time
Here's the problem. For me, anyway. — I believe the Net is an open place. Same with the Web. — I also believe private walled gardens on the Web are fine things. Nothing wrong with them. — My problem is when the former starts looking and acting like the latter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Doc Searls' complaint lands nine days after Dave Winer's "Why Facebook sucks" on Scripting News, making this the second high-profile blogger critique of Facebook in under two weeks — a chorus forming around the same worry rather than isolated gripes.
The nuance matters: Searls is careful to say private walled gardens are fine things in themselves. His target is categorical slippage — the moment something built on the open Net "starts looking and acting like" a closed garden, which is exactly how he reads Facebook's trajectory in October 2007.
First-order effects
- Facebook's push to position itself as a platform rather than a destination now has to answer critics arguing its core structure pulls users off the open Web and behind a login — a reputational constraint on the openness story it tells developers.
Second-order effects
- Rival social services gain a differentiation pitch — stay legible to the open Web — while developers weighing where to build face a sharpened lock-in question about whether audience and identity belong to them or to the platform.
Third-order effects
- If open platforms keep adopting garden mechanics, the line between "the Web" and "services on the Web" blurs, prefiguring fights over data portability and whether regulators or interoperability standards should referee who owns user relationships.
The trend: The Web's center of gravity is drifting from open protocols toward proprietary social platforms whose users supply the content — a shift critics were already naming in 2007.