A New View of the Walled Garden

A lot of people have referred to social networks as the new “walled gardens” - a metaphor that harks back to the days of the dial-up online services America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. Each was its own walled garden with its own content, email system and navigation method.

Now the term has morphed to describe the way people spend time on social networks - doing everything they can within that environment instead of venturing out to the larger Web.

The term has always puzzled me because it’s not like traffic to portals or many other sites is diminishing.

Now, Esther Dyson, the legendary tech thinker, has a twist on the definition, and I think it’s a smart one.

In an opinion column appearing in the Feb. 11 Wall Street Journal (subscription probably required) she writes that consumers will increasingly want to control their interactions with other people and with advertisers:

“Each user determines who will get into his own garden, whether friends or vendors. … Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks.” 

I question whether all people will cultivate these gardens within the social networks, but the idea of a walled garden being a person’s own domain on the Internet makes a lot of sense. It may not be a physical “page” or “profile” but something more ephemeral. A virtual garden, if you will.

Consumers will increasingly demand to control how marketers interact with them, when and for how long. Smart marketers will help nurture their walled gardens, rather than tearing them down.