Mobile garden walls

I have been speed reading my friend Ajit Jaokar's excellent and comprehensive guide to "Mobile Web 2.0", pausing to dig down into topics of special interest to me like geo-enabled data services. I heartily recommend this book, and indeed Ajit's blog, Open Gardens, to anyone who would like to deepen their understanding of the potential for glorious creative explosions (and thereby business opportunities) where mobile and web collide.

Incidentally, I was discussing "walled gardens" with Charla and a dramatherapist colleague of her's over Sunday lunch last week (as a way of explaining the fragmented state of the social web), and they both protested "but I love walled gardens!" In my experience also, people generally do like to feel contained—to have boundaries. A complete lack of boundaries, after all, is effectively anarchy.

So maybe our real challenge is not so much to break down all the walls, but rather to allow people to roam gardens walled by the social and informational boundaries of their own world—rather than those of any given service they happen to be using? Then again, I would argue that a location metaphor for the web is rather misleading in the first place! Hum.

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