WIRED: We need better social tools – not just another walled garden with Google's name on it

THE EARLIEST critics of Facebook called it a “walled garden”. It is not intended as a compliment, even though the term arose from the strategies of companies such as Microsoft, CompuServe and AOL in the 1990s.

The idea then was to create a safe reserve, fenced off from the wild and rambunctious internet. The phrase later became an insult: to be a walled garden meant to deliberately cut yourself off from the reason why your customers were going online. Any walled garden was just a tiny part of the vast territory that was the the net, and no one would pay for the luxury of being locked inside when the rest of the world was in bloom.

The walled garden metaphor is intended to damn a business model. None of the 1990s veterans survived the comparison with the wider net. These days, though, people don’t seem quite as gung-ho for a wild frontier of potential scams or mysterious sources.

It is also not clear what is inside and what is outside the wall. Facebook’s side has 800 million regular users, and 250 million photographs are uploaded to the site every day.

The average American spends 15 minutes on the site per day, about a third of their total time online. The average Facebook user has connections to 130 friends, and you can get from any given Facebook user to another in an average of fewer than five degrees of separation.

If you want to hang out with your friends on the internet, you do it on Facebook. If all your friends are on one side of a wall, wouldn’t you want to be there with them?

What began as a critique has now developed an undertone of fear. Facebook appears to be raising its walls higher to dissuade its users from leaving the site, and to encourage those who used to build independent sites to stay within its confines. A few weeks ago, according to blogger Anil Dash, Facebook announced it was decommissioning a feature that allowed external websites to automatically redistribute their content on Facebook.

The company’s new “frictionless sharing” model has also come in for criticism. Facebook now encourages media companies to offer their pages in internal “apps”, which highlight what your friends are reading – but only show you internal links to that content within Facebook.

It does feel like Facebook is managing to lure professional media producers into its world. The safety of its environment has perhaps less to do with the confidence of users, and more to do with the cosy and contained limits of what a content provider has to actually produce.

Facebook’s world is comfortably constrained. You don’t need to keep up and revamp your website constantly or build complicated workflows within the Facebook environment. You just need to throw some basic text and photography into its machinery and the social networking nature of the site will distribute it and promote it for you.

The growth of the web has not, on the face of it, withered or been contained by Facebook’s parallel expansion. New websites still appear, old content is still updated. No major company’s internet presence exists purely within Facebook, as AOL once dreamed.

But the web’s advance into sociability seems to have slowed. I can’t tell what sites I visit are popular among my peers, unless they highlight them in links sent via e-mail or Twitter. The web is held together by what you search for, not by what my friend and family knows.

Outside Facebook, there is a world of social bubbles, none interlinked. My friends’ photographs may be on Yahoo’s Flickr or Google’s Picasa or some strange Vodafone beast of a site, but I’m unlikely to find them. I’ll just wait until they crop up on Facebook.

The usual power of the internet – decentralised tools, owned by nobody but used by everyone – seems to have failed it. Every competitor to Facebook looks like a single competitor to Facebook, with little chance of success.

It makes one realise how much of the web has been propped up by search giant Google’s identification with it. In its own amiably naive way, Google spent years assuming that, if it was good for the internet, it was good for Google. If more people used the net, more people would use Google, and more people would see its advertisements.

I think that’s why, so far, I’ve been increasingly disappointed with Google+, the company’s social site. Google repeatedly denies that Google+ is a Facebook-killer. If it’s not, it’s certainly intended to be an alternative to Facebook – replicating the service’s core features but on Google, instead of hidden behind Facebook’s walls.

That mitigates the real problem of the great wall of Facebook for Google, which is that Facebook won’t share its content over that wall. You can’t search your Facebook wall on Google, and you can’t peer into Facebook’s garden without climbing into it (and signing up for it). But it doesn’t solve the problem of Facebook for the rest of the net. We need better social tools that everyone can build on – not just another walled garden with Google’s name on it.