Walled-Gardens

The dilemma may be even larger than that. "The Yahoo! guys are trying to create a walled-garden experience; they're like AOL in '95," says Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn, an online social network for technology insiders. That is not a compliment, as AOL, which began as a proprietary online service, started its long decline at about that time, after missing the impact of the new, open environment of the world wide web. With "closed" services like 360, says Mr Perkins, it is now Yahoo! that is missing the trend toward an ever more "open web" that will be "full of one-trick ponies" all available at a single click. If Yahoo!'s users get the feeling that they are being ushered to sites purely because they belong to Yahoo!, reckons Mr Perkins, they will simply click out.

This may be Yahoo!'s fatal flaw. "MSN and AOL are going nowhere," says Mr Saffo, for they have "no soul, no passion." Yahoo! has passion, like Google and other newcomers. It may also have correctly spotted the shift from old media to new, user-generated media. But, says Mr Saffo, it seems to have missed one thing. The "world of the few and large" belongs to media in the 20th century, whereas this century will bring a "world of the many and small". Yahoo!, in short, has old-media plans for the new-media era.

The Economist

When I lived in New Haven, my father used to take me to Edgerton Park, which we used to refer to as "The Walled Park", owing to the fact that it was completely fenced inside a tall stonewall. I have very fond memories of that place. In my memory it was a vast spacious well kept park just a couple of blocks away from where we lived. I went back twenty years later and discovered that although it looked very much like I remembered it, it was in fact tiny. Although I have fond memories of exploring that park in the early 80s, I do have to say that now that I am older, I much prefer going out to the "real" outdoors, places like the Catskills, or even around here to the ruins.

Likewise, I think that as we grown up as a society, we will grow tired of being spoon feed by the AOL and Yahoo!s of the IT industry. I was a big fan of open source in the 90s before it became popular. Today it is possible to build robust enterprise ready systems entirely from Open Source software.

Projects with similar philosophies to Open Source are growing up in the area of content now. The most invoked example of new and small media is the proliferation of blogs of course, but I think the most fascinating examples are projects like Wikipedia which amount to self-regulating anarchy. I am constantly astounded about just how broad the information base is there. I think that it speaks volumes about corporate strategies that Microsoft has invested in a relationship with Encyclopedia Britanica, while Google has donated hardware and money to Wikipedia.

I think Google is right to leave the content to the amateurs. I guess the market will decide who is right.