Hey Social Network Walled Garden: FYI, The cool ran out in 2006

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google ChromeOS announcement and its impact on the Enterprise. Disqus, one of my all-time favorite blog tools, dutifully posted Social Media reactions across Twitter and Friendfeed. However, the most spirited debate sparked by this post happened not in my blog comments or on Twitter. It happening on Facebook as I write this. Here’s what’s there, so far.

FBComments

(sorry for the low res pic. Ill update with another one as soon as I can)

Want to know who these very smart folks are? Too bad.

The irony here is that Facebook and LinkedIn do allow my friends, who have never heard of each other, to have a discussion. And Facebook is happy to make it very easy to pull in my blog RSS feed to spark that discussion. So why not let Disqus expose this to all my friends on other networks. If you must, insist that a participant sign in or sign up to your network to add to the discussion, but expose the damn conversation, will ya?

I get that LinkedIn and Facebook sprouted back when it was all about creating closed networks and these platforms have adapted since then but the willingness to let specific conversations seep out is woefully tepid. Had you let MY social network (of which any one platform controls but a small fraction) see the discussion ensuing on YOUR service, between very smart people in YOUR network , my guess is that more people would be inclined to engage on your platform. And maybe others would be compelled to sign-up if they haven’t already done so.

But no – you’re so hell bent on keeping Google’s crawler in the dark that you’re willing to prevent plenty of super smart people on my other networks from participating in a great conversation that you facilitated.

User engagement on a blog post or other social objects (photos, videos etc) that I syndicate into Facebook is a true showcase of intent, and that’s gotta mean higher CPMs for you. That’s much better than silly defensive tactics such as copying FriendFeed/Twitters UI that early adopters like me might appreciate but alienate your mainstream users.

You’re just cutting your nose to spite your face.

End of rant.

Update: After writing this it got me thinking about the TechCrunch Real Time Crunch Up that’s underway right now.  Its great that were discussing this topic but really, what’s the point of real-time anything in the context of the social web, when two of the largest social networks throttle output to any real time engine.

I’m headed over there this afternoon. Lets see if this topic comes up.

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