Facebook NOT a walled garden

ByLaurel Papworth

A walled garden doesn’t let you take information in or out. Facebook has done a great job – in the last few weeks since their Facebook Application upgrade – of letting information in. Now let’s see how they let information out. (My previous post outlining why Facebook is a Gated Community not a Walled Garden)….

A walled garden doesn’t let you take information in or out. Facebook has done a great job – in the last few weeks since their Facebook Application upgrade – of letting information in. Now let’s see how they let information out. (My previous post outlining why Facebook is a Gated Community not a Walled Garden).


There are four widgets here for iGoogle –
In the Top Left corner:

Facebook Gadget

Categories: Fun & Games, Lifestyle

Recieve your latest notifications on Facebook, check out your friends’ latest updates, view photos, and even launch Facebook searches from all from your Google Homepage!

Contact the developer Brian Ngo – Seattle, WA

Top Right: the usual RSS for the Facebook blog

Facebook Blog


1,543 users / 23,800 pageviews

Bottom Left: random Facebook Du Jour foto from some dude’s Facebook foto album (and yes I’ve checked the code:

Facebook Dish du Jour

Category: Lifestyle

Dish du Jour

Contact the developer ffrenchie – london

Bottom Right: The one with the dodgy looking pink elf is

Facebook

Categories: Communication, Lifestyle

Use this gadget to get a glimpse at your facebook profile from google

Contact the developer Jeffrey Ravenhorst

This one is installed but not currently working – I’m pretty sure it DID work, which puts paid to the whole “you can’t get an update on your friends” boohoo. BTW I keep my profile PRIVATE on Facebook, so I can’t test all apps.:

Date Machina
Date Machina is a new Facebook extension that sets up daily dates with your Facebook friends, giving preference to your top choices.
http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~pshyu/matchbook/gadget/gadget.php

Hmm what else do we have? Ah yes I know, THIS HERE BLOG has a Facebook application:
NOT BEING A WALLED GARDEN is what it says. 🙂

I’ve loaded in the Email app on my Facebook – not all is working, but it has only been about 6 weeks since Facebook opened their doors. AllAboutFacebook and Zdnet have been talking about Facebook being an email killer:

I have now heard from a couple of sources that Facebook is hard at work developing a Facebook email application. A few of the features include integration of external email addresses, no size limitation, contact groups so that you can broadcast your emails kind of like a blog post and any image included in your emails can quickly be tagged and added to your Facebook galleries.

Fotos you upload to Facebook will show up in your WordPress blog,

Click to see full picture – WordPress Dashboard at top, Facebook goodness underneath.
I really don’t know what Jeremiah Owyang, Matt Dickman, Robert Scoble are all on about. No it’s not that easy, no it’s not Web 3.0 but given the whole shebang has been galloping along in this version for oh, about 6 weeks, it’s not too shabby either. Patience little grasshopper. *poke* Not saying it will end up as RSS/API or better, but it’s not hard to develop these thingies.

What other apps are there outside of Facebook pulling information through? I’m going to go watch the Evening News (yes I still watch TV from time to time) – when I get back I expect ya all to have filled up comments with examples of other external apps/social networks pulling data through from Facebook. Okidokiartichoki?

EDIT: And for giggles, I created a Facebook group to list external sites and applications (e.g. WordPress, iGoogle, Blogspot) that pull information from Facebook to external sites.

EDIT 2: I did a tonne of research on, shall we call it the Facebook Bashing meme? The RSS conspiracy? – heh – and I was able to find this blog post thank to the miracle of Google search 😛 and from that found Facebook’s help on enabling RSS. It doesn‘t answer the walled garden question (as it’s traditionally defined) completely but it goes a long way to help. BTW I also read a post that says its possible to build an application using F8 to export profiles and so on from Facebook. The Parakey purchase seems to imply a desktop app solution.

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4 Comments

  1. I will have to remember okdokiartichoki

    I think Facebook has a lot of potential. Thanks for highlighting ways to use it better.

  2. BOLLOCKS!!
    My daily experience with FaceBook feels pretty ‘walled in’ to me. I still find myself at facebook.com every time I need to see what’s going on with ‘my peeps’.

    Let’s not split hairs about definitions of Walled Gardens vs Gated Communities (unless you can give us a better term for a truly open community / platform).

    Your point about FaceBook being much better at letting information flow in than out is a good one. Perhaps that fact that most of the current facebook apps pull information IN to FaceBook is the heart of the matter. I would be watching your ‘External sites that take Facebook information’ list grow from its current 3 entries, but I can’t find an RSS feed for it (and buggered if I’m going to navigate thru facebook every hour just to check).

    I will work up a more substantial reply in a blog post of my own soon .

    Fang – Mike Seyfang

Comments are closed.