Second is Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
I like that.
Just because a person joins a particulair network doesn’t mean he wants to join all of them.

Fred Wilson also discusses the Open Social Network and agrees with my point above. He notes, “I wish it were so, but most of Facebook’s traditional users (like my two daughters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Facebook.”

I would question whether we can have the notion of a ‘traditional Facebook user’ seeing as how Facebook has been open to ‘the rest of us’ for less than a year.
For sure, there is a huge sucking action that is pulling everyone in to Facebook. But we have no idea at all whether they will still be there or using it in a few years. That’s not to say that Facebook will fold up overnight – no more than MySpace or any other network with users will. But what our practices and attitudes are going to be over the years, we just don’t know.
Thus, describing a couple of teenage Facebook users as ‘traditional’ is pointless.

The moo@moo.com got me thinking about OpenID (again), which is great, but no one gets it and uses it.

And still, if people were, where is the value for MySpace to open up? They want to be closed, because everyone tries to get in anyway (widgets, …). Same for Facebook. If I owned either, why should I open up?

Right now people join those sites and are kept on board. It’s not too easy to migrate somewhere else. If you look at the recent Flickr issues – you see exactly that. They are so open – API, communication, they love you – as long as it suites them. In the end they censor people on their plattform, censor their protest and just get away with it.

But not just because they banned protest pictures from the public “streams”, but rather because the social network is strong. So many people stay because others stay. The best reason of all reasons – at least for many.

I think to combat this notion people need to get aware here. Aware what is done on those sites with the data they provide and aware if they really want to allow anyone to do this.

E.g. in Flickrs case I am (of course) not aware that Y! is harvesting data – no idea – but they censor it which is just as bad and should concern everyone. It doesn’t matter if you are directly affected or not (yet).