Excerpted from WIRED magazine:
The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down
…If you examine them closely, the social websites that are all the rage now have a strong family resemblance to the earliest internet giant, America Online. In the early ’90s AOL built a walled garden that functioned as the shallow end of the internet pool. People joined to get their feet wet, and then eventually abandoned AOL. The social web is the new walled garden: the photos we upload to Facebook, the 140-character messages we post to Twitter, and all of this other social activity is more or less locked away in those services. A friend cannot reply to your Twitter post without registering an account, and you are basically locked out of doing anything on Facebook unless you sign up. And it’s all-but-impossible to take all your stuff out of these services in order to switch to a competitor….
Google has taken the first step toward knocking down the walls. Last week, the company announced, to great fanfare, something called Google Wave. It’s an open platform for real-time communication and sharing media, and it’s aimed directly at Facebook and Twitter. With Wave. any competent developer will have the tools build a Facebook or a Twitter — or more to the point, whatever comes next — and, even more important, any user content poured into a Wave-based system will be accessible by anyone that user has granted permission to have it. The philosophies of openness and accessibility are baked right in to the tool. If Wave turns into the tsunami that Google hopes it to be, then for the web of the future you will truly need only a single log-in.
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