An interesting response by Steve Bryant on Reel Pop blog to Steve Rubel's critique of "Facebook" being a walled garden community which gives nothing back to the overall Web.
Rubel says concerning Facebook:
"For all of the excitement around Facebook and its application platform, it's essentially a giant walled garden. You can embed virtually anything you want inside Facebook. Just like open APIs, Facebook's developer program lets anyone create value in the ecosystem.
"The problem, however, lies in this fact - Facebook gives nothing back to the broader web. A lot of stuff goes in, but nothing comes out. What happens in Facebook, stays in Facebook. As Robert Scoble noted, it's almost completely invisible to Google. You can share only a limited amount of data on your public 
page - as he has here. That's fine for many users, but not all."
I like Bryant's response to Rubel's argument: "Facebook remains a walled garden because exclusivity creates demand. Privacy also creates demand, and privacy creates a sense of community."
Of course Bryant's comments are talking of nothing more than differentiation and niche marketing.
Whether it's social networking, online video or web portals, everything does seem to start from these places in general, and if we want to interact with general information and content, those are places to go, but when you start wanting specifics, so-called "walled gardens" are where you want to end up at.
This is why we'll see more and more of a move toward niche sites and numerous categories for the years ahead on the Internet. Even though this has been talked about for years, we're really just starting to see it happen in a large way. So when I say walled garden, I'm talking about making decisions to focus on subject matter that will eliminate those that have no interest, which creates a walled garden in the sense of getting rid of general, curiosity seekers, and finding those that are true fans of whatever it is you're providing.
People start to get bored with any type of community that only deals with general, scattered information and content. Everyone has specific interests that they want to share with others that also have those interests. If you want to call that a walled garden or whatever, doesn't matter.
I think what's going to happen is people will keep some type of connection with general web sites just to get an overall feel of what's going on, but their main time and interest will involve those sites that line up with their very specific interests and passions.
Our online marketing efforts will be much more productive the more we focus on very specific interests people have.
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