Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. They’re always insightful and lead to deeper thinking. That’s one of the great values your posts have always brought me.

Of course you’re right about the analogies being all wrong. I’ve been going through the same issue really with some recent “VoIP is Dead” and “Telco 2.0″ discussions. And by pushing the envelope, my sense is that rather than engage some folks in thoughtful really figuring out what the new syntax we use might be, there just more confusion, division and taking sides than ever. That frustration is holding me back from re-engaging in those conversations right now, but I expect I’ll work past that.

You’re right about Facebook still being behind a fence. I suppose rather than a walled garden, it’s inside a chain link fence – still try to contain and control. As you said, inclusive but private still.

I’m 55 and appreciate your thoughts on resource management and how we each embrace social networking sites or tools. And that you don’t adapt to them in quite the same way. I don’t do enough to appreciate how other people use them, but I think that’s frequently a result of seeing people react in knee-jerk fashion, the criticizing without really trying to find a way to use tools effectively. I run into a lot of people who denigrate the tools, but really don’t understand what they do or how they might be useful. In your case, like mine, I think the issue is that there’s such a plethora of tools it’s often more comfortable to settle into our tools and habits that fit easily and not force ourselves to dig deeper into some of them. At least that is surely my case.

I can’t comment on the Winer hack for Twitter. I manage my Twitter feed in such a way that I don’t really have a need for extreme filtering. And I subscribe to Stowe Boyd’s theory that the stream has so much that you can dip your cup in whenever you like. If something is important, I don’t believe we’ll miss it. It’ll be around in the stream somewhere we dip our cup.

Thanks again for taking time to comment, Doc. We don’t exchange messages very often these days and it’s nice to hear your thoughts.

Several thoughts here.

First, all analogies are wrong. Just like all metaphors and similes. That’s part of their charm. One thing resembles another in a meaningful way, yet is not the same. I’m not trying to weasel here, because I still think my AOL analogy is about as correct as any Facebook analogy can get.

Because Facebook is a walled garden, just like AOL was. Even if Facebook is big and inclusive and welcoming and lots of other nice stuff, it’s still a private space. Yes, it has lots of connections outside its garden (hey, so did AOL, once it got buried in clues), but the walls are still there. It is a containment zone.

Second, I should have followed your lead and taken a much more cautious approach in saying yes to friend invitations at Facebook. But now that I’ve friended so many faces I hardly know, I’m not sure what to do, or if it’s worth the time (or the icky feelings required) to purge them. But, that’s just me. I’d rather put the effort into stuff that works for everybody in the open Net, rather than work for one company operating its own private environment somewhere inside the Net. That’s just a resource management choice of the sort one makes at age 60. We lost Roland Piquepaille, I learned today. He wasn’t a Facebook friend (far as I know; I haven’t checked), but he was a fellow journalist and blogger, and only two years older than myself. A sobering moment.

Third, for the reasons I just gave, I’m not ready to drink from the fountain of networking and collaboration that Facebook supports. I’m glad it’s there and that it works for lots of people, even if it looks like The Borg to me. Thing is, I have my own founts of networkig and collaboration. They’re at Linux Journal, the Berkman Center, the ProjectVRM community, and out in the other projects I’m involved with. (Not the least of which are my consulting and speaking gigs, which put food on the table.) Then there’s my family and physical-world friends, which I’ve neglected more than I like. So I have priorities here. They’re ones that work for me. Maybe not perfectly, but well enough to get some stuff done.

Fourth, I’m not a fan of “social” everything, and don’t think of things like Twitter and Facebook in social terms. I don’t even think of Cluetrain as especially “social,” even though, when I look back on what it said, I can see how it laid the groundwork for much of the “social” stuff that’s going on today. The problem is, these tools and environments aren’t even close to what will make us truly social online as well as offline, and will knit the two together. They point the way, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

As for Twitter, check out what I wrote here earlier today, about Dave Winer’s Friends of Dave hack. Not many (any?) commenters like it so far, but what the hell. One relevant point (to here) is maybe a bit too subtle, lost in the rant. It’s that we’re very early in this Net thing. Tools like Twitter and environments like Facebook — and even services such as Google’s search — are all still early stage stuff. They are crude instruments, stone tools. In the long run our tools will be much different: a full carpentry set beside today’s flint axes and spear heads.

I’m working on providing the personal stuff: tools that make individual customers independent of vendors like Facebook and services like Twitter — yet better able to engage with them, and through them, on our terms and in our ways, and not just in theirs.

That mission, that calling, colors a lot of my writing lately. I have to do a better job of realizing that the likes of Twitter and Facebook are just fine and quite useful things, even if my job is to work outside of them, for the good of everybody. Including them.