Monday, May 08, 2006

MySpace: Walled Garden 2.0?

Sam Sethi, who I met at the Mashup event last week in London, writes:

So for now, although I created MySpace and entered MyDetails and linked to MyFriends, it is clearly not MyData to extract out of the network. MySpace is not alone. LinkedIn, FaceBook, Live Contacts and many of the other social networks have created similar walled gardens. Like the wall garden portals in web 1.0, closed Web 2.0 social networks that think, because it is free, they can exploit the user community for their own personal “advertising” gain will also lose out. 

Sam’s talking about microformats like XML, which would allow users - that is to say, customers - to make their data even more useful to them. MySpace doesn’t seem to think that its customers need, want, or deserve this.

So is MySpace just Walled Garden 2.0 rather than Web 2.0? I’ll ask our presenters and the audience on June 21st.