I love this post. It parallels thoughts I've been having and espousing for a couple of years now about the current state of the web. It's nice to see somebody else finally getting it.

I disagree with the comment, "Twitter, which is open". It's not. It would be open if Twitter released a protocol specification and allowed others to build "twitter daemons" that all communicated in the same way. If they basically allowed anybody to run their own twitter server.

It is, however, pretty damn close. Anybody can create a Twitter client and use the published Twitter API to interact with their service. But then, Facebook kinda does that too. Facebook does however have more stuff that they don't allow third parties to interact with, thereby creating the walled garden.

I think what's changed between the days of AOL and today is that we really start to think of web apps as apps. If AOL was a walled garden - or a walled community, then Facebook is really just a walled web-based app. And the past several decades of computing has taught us that just because you put your data into an app doesn't mean that you can get it out again. So if Facebook is just another app, then maybe we tolerate the walls a little more.

I agree that people will bend towards openness eventually. But it's a problem we've been dealing with for decades. And I expect it's a problem we'll be dealing with for decades to come.

True ubiquitous computing has a long way to go...