The Walled Garden Bubble

Jason Kottke has a great post [via mashable] that summarizes a lot of what I've been thinking lately about the deluge of social networking applications (comparing Facebook and its ilk to AOL of yore). His first footnote says it best:

The only reason I even wrote that post is that I got tired of seeing the same people who think AOL sucked, that Times Select is a bad business decision for the NY Times, that are frustrated by IM interop, and that open participation on the web is changing business, media, and human culture for the better trumpeting that this new closed platform is the way forward.

A few days ago, in answer to Web Worker Daily's question "How do you prefer to be contacted?", I commented :

Call me if you want to talk now, otherwise send an email. Those are about the only two technologies that are universally compatible and accessible to everyone. IM is fine if we both happen to be on the same protocol, but don’t expect me to sign up for each new bubble app that comes out, I don’t want to spend my precious time managing a dozen different profiles and apps.

There's never a shortage of commentary on Web 2.0 (and overload). Some historical context is given in Why We're Like a Million Monkeys on Treadmills [via InsideGoogle]

I'm a big fan of innovation, and there are a lot of interesting ideas coming out. But to me, the greatest potential of the internet is realized from openness and interoperability. Only a handful of these new social apps will ever achieve critical mass, hopefully openness will be a major factor to consumer acceptance. Radio, TV, and Plain Old Telephone Service had the advantage of government regulation to make them universal. With email, we were lucky that the right people were involved. Time will tell if the market is capable of keeping the internet open.