… and he and Tim Berners-Lee want you to stop breaking the Internet.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several occasions to be invited into someone’s walled garden on the internet. You know the places. Lovely little sites that are entirely self-contained and which you can’t access unless you are a member? In the old days, Compuserve and AOL were the big walled gardens. These days, it’s Facebook and Linked-In.

These two social networking sites provide easy access to various tools for maintaining a web presence, but also keep enough meta-data that it’s easy to track down other people that you are likely to know. FWIW, I have no problem with the meta-data aspects of the site. If you want to find people that you may know due to past associations, well more power to you. The concern I have is that once you go beyond those functions and start using the internals of the garden to maintain information, well, then the only people who can see that information are those who belong to that garden. Even that is fine with me if the information is private and should be restricted through some form of identity management and authorization; but what if you intend the information to be public, should everyone have to come into the garden to see what should be public? What does restricting the information to only those with (Facebook) accounts do for you? You aren’t controlling access, you are just making the owners of your walled garden a little richer by increasing the popularity of their sites.

I mentioned that I’ve had several invitations respecting walled gardens recently. FWIW, two were on Facebook. A few of these are related to my upcoming 20th high school reunion (er, actually, that should be 20 year - technically it’ll be our 1st reunion and at this rate, our 20th will be in the year 2389) and seeing someone’s pictures, or viewing our class group or…. The other was a friend who stopped blogging publically (for the most part) and is now (as I understand it) “writing on her wall” (which is a wonderfully ironic image for this post). The Linked-in request was to “recommend” someone professionally. Okay, it’s true that I do belong to Linked-in, but I use it as an online rolodex, not as a way to keep in touch with what former colleauges are doing. I don’t “recommend” people. I don’t ask to be “recommended” and I don’t really keep up with what happens. As far as Facebook? Not participating and not joining. Use the (free) tools that are available like flickr for images and blogger or wordpress for blogging. In the meantime, if Facebook and/or Linked-in ever open up to the rest of the Internet, then maybe I’ll look at your images and read your writing. But if they don’t, then you’re restricting yourself to only a subset of the people on the Internet.

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oh, and You Kids Get Off My Lawn!