The 'Walled-Garden' Social Networking Site

In Jakob Neilson's alertbox newsletter for this week:

FACEBOOK AND METCALFE'S LAW

We are getting close to the bursting of Bubble 2.0, so it's a good idea to
review some of the precursors of Bubble 1.0.

In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems
of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the
Internet and tries to add value by being closed.

> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html

Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to
replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It'll fail
again.

This article is almost a decade old (9 years, and 8 months, to be more exact). Yet, it still rings true. Of course, Humans don't learn from their mistakes. So, history is cyclic.

The problem with this facet of Facebook is that their Developers Platform does not do much to reduce the 'Walled-Garden' effect. Despite all the API documentation and libraries, I still cannot get my posted items RSS Feed to be available publically. It's irritating, and there's no reason that Facebook should force it to be private. Nor should a user be forced to login to Facebook to view an RSS feed I want to be public.

The thing about Metcalfe's law (or the reverse version that Neilson talks about) is that if you divide the size of your network in half, you drop its value by a factor of 4. Users have little loyalty as it is.

As social networks proliferate, most people will be unable to commit the time required to be on a dozen or more sites at once. So, which are they going to choose? Whatever the merits of your Social Networking site, it's likely that any particular user won't stay with it.

Social Networking has two paths to the future. One is 'Meta-social networking' that will work like Meta-search engines. The other is Open social networking systems. If you can't deal with that, get out of the way.