On: The Importance of the Facebook Redesign

The problem with Facebook is that it'll remain an involuntary walled garden.

So? Most people don't want constant out access from the information they have there. The one important asset, photos, already can be easily extracted.

If you choose to use Facebook, you choose to play by their rules. Nobody forces you to pick them over anybody else.

Sure, but if I choose a competitor I either have to convince everyone I know to switch or be lonely. This isn't to say that this is Facebook's fault (well, I guess you could make the argument that they haven't tried to connect their network up with others, but that's not really their responsibility either), but it still is a huge pain.

(Similar is the problem with AIM; I don't like it, but few people I talk to use anything else.)

It is a pain, but if it ever gets too much you can quit using it. So I don't hold it against him.

(Zuckerberg recently said on Twitter that Facebook is opening itself up as much as possible this year, so hopefully everybody gets to be happy!)

Walls are irrelevant if you have the whole world inside them. Facebook doesn't need to cooperate with other elements because it is a behemoth. There will always be a minority which wants to see more outside access, and Facebook can appease them, but they don't need to go in that direction for growth. The way out for them is reorganizing and adding more features to tie people further to the service.