Walled Gardens are Useful
I try not to talk too much about social networks in this space, because video is topic numero uno. But. I'd like to address a recent post on Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, which posited that Facebook detracts from the Web community by being a walled garden almost insurmountable by search engines.
The key grafs compare media and other walled gardens, like Facebook, to New York's Gramercy Park. "Can walled gardens continue thrive in an era of openness," Steve asks. "Can a social network be social even though so little of the community's value is visible to the outside world?"
The answer, duh, is yes. And the Gramercy Park analogy isn't a good one.
Facebook remains a walled garden because exclusivity creates demand. Privacy also creates demand, and privacy creates a sense of community. Hence Gramercy Park is an excellent example, but not for the reasons either Rubel or Jay Rosen (whom Rubel quoted) posit.
Take Jane Jacobs' example in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the signature work of urban planning in the last half-century. Jacobs on Gramercy: "Since it is blessed with splendid trees, excellent maintenance and an air of glamour, it successfully provides for the passing public a place to please the eye, and so far as the public is concerned this is its justification...parks do their job well when they do it beautifully and intensely, not perfunctorily."
Jacobs' views on the utility of parks as social connectors are too complicated to go into fully here. But if we're going to continue with the urban planning/social network analogy, I would suggest that Facebook and Gramercy Park both be noted as extremely successful, extremely high value destinations. Neither suffer from any so-called "burden of locked gates." Quite the contrary: They raise the value of adjoining properties, and they create a sense of community. Not all communities need to be egalitarian.
I'm going to buy 
