Walled Gardens

Walled Gardens, Freedata, Vendor Lock-in are become increasingly common terms in the social networking dictionary What do they all mean? This post covers this topic very nicely. Some points to ponder

• Is your stand alone data interesting or is the cloud interesting?
• Is your network big enough to be able to make meaningful inferences?
  
• Will this inference be useful to you and your network only?

Clearly social networking poses a whole slew of interesting challenges. What initially did not seem to be a computer science problem is slowly turning out to be as deep rooted in computing as coal is to newcastle.