"Email? I only use that when I have to contact old people!"
– frequent quote these days from teenagers
When I started using "the Net" back in mid-1980s, the world of "e-mail" was an incredibly fractured place. There were the big services of CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, The Well… there were the thousands of small BBS’s… there were "corporate services" like MCI Mail and IBM PROFS… and there were all sorts of others services in the middle (my particular focus in those days was EcoNet, given my involvement then in environmental activism). They all shared one thing in common:
They were all walled gardens.
Users on the system could only e-mail other users on the same system. CompuServe users with their (then) numeric accounts could only talk to other CS users. GEnie users to GEnie users, MCI Mail to MCI Mail… and so on.
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).
While the fight against the interconnection continued for quite a long time, especially with some of the largest services continuing to try to go it alone, eventually all the services succumbed to the inevitable and provided SMTP gateways that allowed their members to send messages to everyone else.
All was good – and everyone could send messages to everyone else.
However… a curious thing seems to be happening more and more on this thing we call the Internet. Increasingly, our messages are NOT moving over what is traditionally known as "email" but instead are migrating to other services.
You could argue that this started some time ago with the walled gardens of instant messaging. Users of AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, MSN/WLM, Jabber, Skype, IRC, etc. all can have really nice conversations with each other… but no one else. As IM has continued to grow in usage and replace "traditional" email (which we could argue about why but I personally think it has a lot to do with "presence", but let’s save that for another post another day), we’ve moved to a different messaging paradigm where we write shorter, quicker messages. And we’ve also become quite comfortable with our IM walled gardens. It’s routine for people to run several different IM clients (or use something like GAIM that works with multiple services). Looking down at my task bar, I count 4 IM clients, and I know there are 3 more on my laptop that I could be running. Now, the walls of IM are slowly breaking down… there’s "federation" now between MSN/WLM and Yahoo. GoogleTalk can work with Jabber. Other interconnection services are appearing.
But looking beyond IM, so many conversations now are moving to "social networking services". The quote I started this article with did not come from any particular place, but it’s the kind of thing that I’ve seen repeated again and again in any interview with teenagers (or even those in their 20s). The service we know as "email" is today just a "communication mode of last resort" or "least common denominator" to communicate with those too old or clueless. All meaningful communication occurs within the worlds of MySpace, Facebook or any one of a zillion other websites that seem to be popping up on a daily basis.
And all those sites are chasing each other. Facebook started out as something of a "college/university version of MySpace"… now it’s added "professional" settings like LinkedIn. LinkedIn has gone the other way in adding "college" features to attract the college/university crowd. Orkut started out as more of a dating site and then added other fields and settings. MySpace continues adding new features. Not a day goes by when there isn’t some notice about a new service that has been launched.
Even Twitter, which I personally use more as a micro-blogging platform, is used as a messaging platform by many. And the "status" format of Twitter can be found in Facebook as well as newer services like Jaiku.
What do they all have in common? Simple:
They are all walled gardens.
Each one is a messaging world unto itself. Facebook users can only see messages from other Facebook users – and only generally when logged into the site. Ditto LinkedIn…. Xing… MySpace… and others. Twitter allows the public viewing of messages, but you can also change it to give only updates to friends. (To "reply" in Twitter, of course, one would need to be a member… and also be "followed" by the person you are replying to.) Sites like YouTube and Frappr blur the lines by providing messaging as well.
The result, of course, is that like running multiple IM clients, we all have multiple social networking accounts.
How many do you have?
For me, I can remember at least: LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, ecademy… There’s probably a dozen others where I signed up to try it out and then forgot about it. In each one, I can send and receive messages to and from the other members. I can post updates and see messages from my "friends".
Interestingly, most all of these sites fall back on that "least common denominator" of good old e-mail to let me know that I have messages waiting for me. I have to go back to those sites, of course, to read the messages. Yes, some sites do updates via SMS and some let you subscribe via RSS, but generally you have to go back into the site.
The other intriguing difference is that within those sites, you can generally only see messages from the people you choose to see. Within Facebook or Twitter, you only see updates from people who you have added as a friend. Your friends or contacts can send you messages in many services, but others can’t until they are your friend.
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, with email/SMS helping keep us aware of updates. Given the amount of spam plaguing email, this may in part a reaction and a desire for purer message flow.
So how do you communicate with others within this space? Or stay up on what someone is doing?
It’s not enough even to follow someone’s blog anymore, because they may be posting more updates to their Twitter, Facebook or other account.
Given that email may not be the best way, how do you best reach someone? Which IM service? Which social networking site? Which ones do they use? Which ones do they monitor the most?
In which walled garden do they spend most of their time?
Interesting post Dan – it’s particularly interesting that most social networking sites have to fallback on “conventional” email to notify messages, but the model within the social network relies on user opt-in – you can control who communicates with you.
Long term I think we’ll see convergence, in the same way that walled garden email converged and IM is starting to converge now.
Great post, Dan. I’m not sure that I’d say we’re really splitting off into different walled gardens or gated communities because there doesn’t seem to be much permanence to any of these migrations into various social networking sites. People are jumping from Myspace to Facebook to MyFace or whatever the next hip place happens to be. We’re not settling in for the long haul in any of them. None really do anything all that amazing really, so they can only sustain the illusion of being “new” and superior for so long. Until somebody comes up with some really awesome and original gimmick or innovation to keep people interested, everyone’s going to keep exploring social networking sites and moving on.
As for IM, I think it’s only a matter of time before consumers get sick of running five different programs and go for GAIM (Which I’m going to check out, by the way, since you’ve told me about it.)or something else that allows them to pare down the applications. I’m not sure what choice Yahoo!, MSN and others would have other than allowing full interaction with one another. This is, of course, unless Skype starts giving away free calls to regular phone numbers or something like that.
In response to wunot, I’d like to note that you can turn off the chat feature. I have never used it, myself.
As for the original post…I couldn’t finish reading it because I was too stunned that someone remembered GEnie. I was STAR on there in the late 80s and early 90s. 🙂
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BLOG NAME: Disruptive Conversations
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TITLE: Facebook: new social network site; same old walledgarden
BLOG NAME: Derivadow
Last year the buzz was around MySpace now its Facebook and before that Friends Reunited and Linkedin. I have to confess that Ive never really grokked these services – Ive played around with them a bit – but generally never really got that…
I meant to write this post tomorrow. A bunch of things started to tick me off, all in a row.
* No forwarding in their messages function. Heck, no sharing the email with me until I go to their site. (Eric Rice blogged that yesterday).
* No RSS on anything.
* No way to take a Facebook video elsewhere, not even an embed code.
* No way to port my contact book out to somewhere else.
Yep, sounds like walls.
I still like the app, and I’m hoping they change this mode.
Well, “walled garden” is going on my Bingo card for the next conference!
As a mature member of the so-called twopointoh world, I’m finding it fascinating how little the users seem to matter to these services. I’m tired of having to sign in ad nauseum after email messages (or should that be, in the new “exclaim-speak” “email messages!”), and I’m tired of hearing people complain to other users about features that are missing or are faulty.
The ONLY exception to these deaf-to-user services seems to be Jaiku, which not only has a good set of features (RSS, and group channels, for example) that enhance the boring “Me! Me! ME!” of Twitter but also has a development team who actually are in the mix and answering users directly, either in channels devoted to the site or in comments on individual posts. There’s no messy “send us an email and tell us if you’ve found a bug!”; all you have to do post on #jaiku (without any secret invitation to do so) and people see it. And respond. It’s a breath of very fresh air.
The interesting difference between the current walled gardens and the ones of the days of yore is that these walled gardens have APIs. Although there were gateways for some of the old mail services (recalling emails with ! @ and # characters in them) the APIs may provide a greater way to integrate them all.
Jaiku effectively opens the walls by aggregating content from outside and then presenting the aggregate as an information stream or a microblog.
A silent evolutions in personal communication has happened. Now you can walk around with SMS texting, Jaiku, email, and the mobile version of Facebook all trickling into my pocket at a rate you can control. Although walled from each other, those walls prevent contamination and ensure redundancy of communications. That redundancy ensures uptime and contact through an all-channel hailing process, something I learned years ago flying strategic air missions around the world.
How quickly things changed since May! Twitter is now integrated into Facebook, Facebook into Ning. The Facebook email app just came out… slice and dice and place wherever you want within the confines of Web 2.0 (can’t wait for Web 3.0). Here’s another take on walled gardens vs gated communities by moi. 🙂
@Laurel – No, some fundamental things have not changed since May. Yes, Facebook has rolled out their API to let people bring content *in* to Facebook, but it’s a one-way journey. Content inside of Facebook stays inside of Facebook. See /2007/07/18/facebook-and-th/ for my latest view.
And yes, content in “silos” can leave Facebook. For instance, inside the Facebook walls, you can update Twitter using the Twitter app and that update will go back out to Twitter. Same for Pownce… same for other apps that are for a website. When you are in that app inside of Facebook, you can update the original site.
But how do you forward a Facebook email outside the walls? How do you share a photo inside of Facebook with someone outside? If you write Notes, how does someone outside read them?
The answer is that they can’t… without being logged into FB. Those are the walls to which I refer. Facebook is a really great portal that allows you to suck in all sorts of content. But it puts walls around that content as far as getting it back out.
Thank you for this post! I find it exhausting to keep up with all these social networks. I would like a program similar to GAIM for my social networks. I want ONE website to go to to see updates on my friends from various networking sites but unfortunately no has done that yet. I really hope they do create one.
The walled content feature is the only reason that I allowed my daughter to use facebook (for which I have her password.) I appreciate this privacy feature and think it’s entirely appropriate for minors. I’ve heard today’s teens described as electronically promiscuous and have to agree. They are very open and transparent and I’m a bit relieved to at least “hope” that only her friends are viewing her material.
As an adult with a full-time career and all the other things that go along with that and children, I’m amazed that people have the time to keep up any of the sites discussed here. I can barely keep up reading the news and info sites I’ve grown to appreciate.
Facebook is nice for contacting lost friends, classmates, and relatives but that is about it. The chat function on facebook is nice but if you have 200 friends, and say 25 are on line at one time, it’s hard to deal with 25 requests for a chat at once.
Fortunately, facebook the walled-garden of facebook has another nice aspect, being walled, it keeps your private data away from the wider net unless you choose to make your contact information available outside the internet.
But your private profile and your postings remain private. This is great for privacy advocates, but not good for search engines like Google. Good, I don’t want google to get my personal info and try to monetize it. They are monetizing enough already.