Failbook and the Walled Garden Dilemma
Here’s one to add to the now infamous FAIL Blog.
A friend of mine logged into Facebook this afternoon to find his wall inundated with questionable passes from one of his friends. Apparently the user has endured late night pangs and couldn’t resist demonstrating his/her passion via asynchronous social network communication.
The bottom line is that Facebook has become the victim of both what it wants to be (a walled garden) and what it continually works to avoid (open, low security platform, i.e. MySpace). The beauty of Facebook has always been its ability to filter out spam and bots via the secure login approach; however, it’s become increasingly clear that this model cuts Facebook off from tapping into the larger, less regulated web 2.0 sphere.
I’ve always been a fan of Facebook because it’s sealed off from the outside world; none of the crap can get in. Once the walls come down, the crap comes in. Facebook has had no choice but to bring down the walls, clearly anticipating the next step in social networking (i.e. the OpenSocial model, yet to be adapted), or their purported desire to be your next Google or Netvibes homepage.
However, the fact that the crap gets in makes me concerned that the open platform thing is going to get messy - we all want ubiquity, but at what cost? The walled garden may be a bust, but at least I’m not being hit on by sweetangelx3.