Walled Gardens….
January 18th, 2006
I happened across Bill Burnham’s most excellent post via Susan Mernit’s commentary on it…
Bill examines various sites on the categories: content availability, index affinity and process simplicity. Overall, I love the analysis, but I would add one more category to the list, namely Toolkit Availability. That is, to what extent are publishing tools available for creators of that data? Blogs are successful because the tools exist for users to publish text easily to web pages and have that content syndicated. What about other content types?
After analyzing a few sites, there’s a good discussion on what they could do (fight ‘em or join ‘em). Overall, I think the future is bleak for these walled gardens. Structurally, they are not set up to transform their internal models and most aren’t brave enough to make a leap to a horizontal or vertical integration. I suspect they’ll go the way of the black knight (a rather obscure reference to a comment left on Bill’s blog)!
Karl believes many of the web 2.0 companies could go that way, but I’m not sure I agree. The walled gardens are threatened because owning data is not going to cut it in the future. One must provide a decent service, and those that do, will win.
I think I’ll write a bit more about this tomorrow… this kind of discussion is very much along the lines of what prompted us to sponsor the Structured Blogging initiative.
Entry Filed under: Internet & Technology
2 Comments Add your own
1. Bill Burnham | January 20th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
What I find interesting is that the technologies that underpin the “pub/sub” world of the web are actually technically not really publish and subscribe. For example, RSS is really just a polling mechanism. I think that it will be interesting to see if someone can create a true REST compatible, pub-sub technology which, a la HTTP or SMTP, becomes the standard for pub-sub interactions. That might be the missing piece.
2. Salim | January 20th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Bill, I have two thoughts about your comment…
Thought #1: You are absolutely dead on (as usual). RSS is a polling technology and fundamentally can’t scale… we need a true pubsub ‘push’ capability at the infrastructure level. The good news is that what you’re describing is exactly what we’ve built at PubSub. We’re a push-based matching system and can route internet-scale content based on complex queries in near real-time (which I dare anyone to say 10 times fast). We are REST compatible.. actually, we’re delivery agnostic… we think it’s important that users get their information as fast as they want it. The protocol you’re describing is probably very close to the JEP-0060 protocol, which Bob has been involved with… it’s pubsub over Jabber – so we get presence, push, content-based routing all built in along with the authorization and authentication (crude though it may be) provided by the IM layer. We’re very excited about Google supporting federated XMPP as this lays down a solid roadmap for the entire space. IM has been waiting for a long time for a decent application (other than chat) to make it truly useful.
Thought #2: Big sigh… I wish you’d quit preempting my thoughts… my next post deals with exactly this issue… and this is the third time this has happened! Are you bugging my skype calls or something??
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