A-bog on Recombine.net

Walled Gardens · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 25, 2007

from an article by Danah Boyd
Discussion that followed this article

Walled Gardens
The term “walled garden”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden_%28media%29
implies that there is something beautiful being surrounded by walls.

A Walled Garden in context of online services-
A company or service Locks in your data to avoid you from migrating to other services. While their intentions might also be to protect your information.

One of the hardest things to do online is to build walls. The web is porous, even more when you can aggregate your data from different sources as well as publish to multiple websites. Danah Boyd points to one interesting change that search engines brought to the internet- they essentially poked holes into a network made of discrete nodes of conversations and ideas. A search engine could to an extent flatten that way you enter and experience the web. Along with the search engines came bots or web crawlers that sniffed around for what people were doing on the web and built a cache that could be later retrieved from a search engine.

While sometimes you may think that your content is private it may not be so when it comes to robots of search engines who can crawl and cache your content. Something even like your profile can be cached and made available to anyone using that search engine. Even if you don’t want it to. On the other hand your service provider may or may not allow you to export or migrate your media/content to another provider. And now this idea is worth pondering over as more and more people are generating content on the web. Shouldn’t this be something one should consider prior to deciding the social network he/she wants to publish their media in? Shouldn’t the social networks and services we use tell us explicitly how our content can be and will be searched, cached or retrieved?

Here is a online service that allows parents to find out if their kids are on the listed social networks.