Jordy Blog

Walled Gardens and Open Source

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

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Google is Scary

Isn’t the way Google wants to track everything about you a little unsettling?

At least it now lets you access your data and doesn’t publish it with “anonymous” (obvious) ids like AOL does. Still the privacy freak in me is a little troubled.

That said, Google has definitely been one of the more benevolent companies out there, at least in my mind anyway.  I’d be interested in seeing what systems they have in place to make sure employees don’t abuse this info.

AOL sucks

AOL sucks for blocking my emails to AOL customers. From their mail FAQ:

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504 – (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic (residential) IP address. AOL will not accept future e-mail transactions from this IP address until your ISP removes this IP address from its list of dynamic (residential) IP addresses. For additional information, please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
===

In these cases, the mail is being rejected because AOL believes it is being sent directly from someone’s computer, rather than through their ISP’s legitimate mail server, a common sign of malicious or abusive email. This can be fixed by them using a stable, legitimate mail server.

You mean I can’t email my brother because I’m a Gundy rather than a Comcast? Way to turn the WWW into the CPW (crappy proprietary web)! This is just one more reason that AOL totally sucks.