(no subject)

[vlion]

About a decade ago or so I visited some people, and we promised to keep in touch on the internet.

Since then they've had livejournals and websites and blogs, so I could keep up with them even after the actual talking with them fell away.

Now I think it's all in facebook, and I don't know anything more, because I refuse to be on Facebook. Facebook is becoming the typical communication medium for people who previously shared with the world. Now its all locked up in the walled garden, and even looking people up in the facebook "phone book" is hard if you're not signed in.I suppose I will have to attempt to find their email and hope that it isn't linked to Facebook and that Facebook doesn't hide the email.


Isn't that kind of sad? I think so.

Comments

[xaea]

i hate facebook. i'm only on it because i WANT to be in touch with the friends i'd never see again if i ever left FB. :(

[vlion]

yeah... when I left, most people didn't keep up contact. I figured good riddance. :-(

[tamouse]

Very sad, yes. We have let ourselves become locked up in these walled gardens, or are forced to subscribe to many of them. Think how life would have been if the postal service or telephones had been like this, even, in this day and age, you can text someone with a cell phone regardless of service they are on.

This is could have happened. Postal service could have been completely private. Telephone interoperability could have been ignored, and the various phone companies that did not work together could have been left to continue as is. Texting was per service for a while (as was paging before it), but through government intervention, required to be made interoperable.

Email was also proprietary for a while, but in this case, market forces actually drove interoperability, as it did with other lower level aspects of computing, but primarily because there was a distinct advantage to being able to communicate in these areas freely.

We might be seeing a slight shift in instant messaging, but not so fast, as more people adopt what is in front of them, or join whatever their friends are on, and standard adoption is lower.

But there is no interoperable stance for social networks and blogs. The walled gardens are at this point so ubiquitous, and locking in users to view their special ads, play their special games, and so on, that it is going to take something very major to make things go the other way.

The distinction between things like email, tcp/ip, and such, and social networks such as FB, G+ and the others before them, is that their users represent a considerable product for the companies that seek access to them. Market forces run in a different direction, then.

[vlion]

I have basically decided that I'm living outside of walled gardens. Not sure I'll be able to do it 100%, but I am going to give it a best effort.

It's really not OK that we live in our little feudal kingdoms and have fealty to our corporate overlords.