Facebook: Are We Going Backward
On Monday Facebook will be making a special announcement, the latest rumor is that they are going to be announcing an email program that is run through Facebook. If this rumor is true, then to me this is a step backward to the walled gardens of yesterday. If you've were on the Internet in the 1990's and early 2000's then you remember AOL at its height. You would get the disk in the mail pop it in your computer and you were in the AOL universe. Want the news sure you could have it as long as it was what AOL said was the news. Entertainment no problem as long as you wanted what AOL had to offer. For a long time this was the Web to a lot of people. It was safe and seemed to have everything you wanted. Of course those who were computer savvy knew that the Web was a whole lot larger and the Web itself was only a small part of the the larger Internet. AOL was just one room in a house standing in the middle of a huge world. Once people knew that there was a larger web out there then AOL felt like a prison rather then a garden. Happily with the explosive growth of broadband and the decline of dialup the AOL walled garden broke down and the Web opened up for most people