Walled Garden Social Networks

So some people out there think that totally open social networks are absolute brilliant and wonderful.  I’m inclined to agree with them that they are brilliant and wonderful for certain purposes.

Walled Gardens are equally useful for the right people at the right time.  Certain parts of life have not are are always going to be more difficult to life-stream.  It isn’t clear that they should be.  Creating social networks structures for them should probably occur in walled gardens.

The basic reasons why are as follows:

• These areas of our lives tend to be highly private, such as our medical records, legal records, and business records
• They tend to involve specialists and generalists, such as lawyers and doctors, who are being cross consulted about both technical issues, theoretical issues, as well as how to find another specialist
• The documentation for these areas tend to multiply out of public sight, by large groups of people that would not normally fit into the two models of web content creation that are floating around, the pyramid theory of 1% massive content creators, etc, and the theory that this is all as if we are playing a MMORPG.
• These documents, or at least the information in them, tend to be shared internally and externally among large bodies of power,such as corporations, law firms, nonprofits, etc, because of smaller interrelated ways people organize themselves
• Often, social constraints and the law itself might limit the passage of documents and information, making it difficult to accurately pass.  It might be better to help develop something third party and work with regulators as well as try to change regulation and social mores.

As a result, it is really beneficial to make highly secured walled gardens for document creation and discussion for professional bodies.  Engineers want to talk to other Engineers.  Lawyers wants to talk to other Lawyers.  Doctors want to talk to other Doctors.  There are Limits on what these and other professionals can and will say to each other due to their governing professional bodies, the law, and other issues.  That being said, if your doctor doesn’t ask for a consult ever for issues he doesn’t know about, s/he’s an idiot.  Making a social network in compliance with HIPAA is smart.  So is organizing lawyers across state bars by practice areas for interstate and international reasons.  Same with Engineers….(though I think, at least with the Comp-sci group, they tend to be better at knowing each other already….)

That’s being said, you want your financial adviser, another group that has a message board somewhere out there about the math of trading theories, to be spilling everything openly?  No- hence the need for it to be walled. You need to make sure it doesn’t damage his/her clients, as well as keep these places discussions at qualified levels.  In order to do so, they are going to have to be walled off.

Sorry, not everything in life is open to everyone. If you want to join some parties, you got to jump the learning hurdles first…