Outside The Walled Gardens

Hi, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, I opened my first email account in 1982. It was an account on CompuServe. And CompuServe, a good friend of mine and I were involved in the earliest consulting work I ever did. Yo, Ron, how you doing? And we found that CompuServe gave us a way to both communicate with one another online with my 300 baud modem and to send files back and forth to one another, which was amazing as we were using, you know, the very earliest, for me, versions of Word. I'd been a WordPerfect user from early on, but Ron was a big Word guy. So we were sharing files back and forth with one another, and it was great. The two of us, you know, just jujuju back and forth, stuff was happening, doing work, making money, having fun. Then suddenly we started to discover that there were other people on CompuServe. The problem was we didn't know any of them. Now, we did eventually get a few people that we knew on CompuServe, and there were all these special interest groups, SIGs, that were popping up on CompuServe, and it was really cool. But then other people started getting email on this other place called America Online. And oddly enough, both of these companies were headquartered at the time in Columbus, Ohio. I think maybe AOL is— still has a significant presence in Columbus. So you had these two companies in Columbus, Ohio, and there were people who had email on AOL and people who had email on CompuServe, and they were talking to each other, and they were talking to each other, and they— but nobody could talk to each across these two things. Well, over the years, things like this, CompuServe and AOL, have started to come to be known by several people, many people, as walled gardens. Inside the walled garden, you can do whatever you want, but out— but you can't communicate with anybody outside the walled garden. Now, today's most famous walled garden is Facebook. Inside of Facebook, you have all this communication, all the stuff that goes on. But if you're on LinkedIn and you also have a Facebook profile, no communication. I've been talking about this in terms of data portability and so, and so on recently. But the big issue for me now comes to YouTube, where here we are inside a garden that's not so walled. Why is it not so walled? Because one of the brilliant, brilliant brilliant, three brilliants, things that YouTube did was to allow us to take the embed code from any video and put it anywhere else. On my blog, on your blog, on a web page, on any place we want. You can take the embed code, put it over someplace else, bingo! No more walled garden. People who never go to YouTube watch millions and millions and millions of YouTube videos a day. Now that's important for us because it— what it says to us is that we can communicate with one another and we can communicate with people who do not find YouTube to be a particularly appealing place by using the YouTube embed function and still retain our YouTube identity. You can still be inside the walled garden, inside the kind of— it's not really a wall, there's probably a hedge you know, around the garden now with little places where you can get out of it. And as well as starting to talk to people who live other places outside any of these gardens, outside any place like this. So that's really, for me, one of the most exciting developments, uh, that's going on today. If you take a look at Seesmic, for example, go on over to the Seesmic channel here on YouTube, and what you'll see is the founder of one of the hottest new experiments in online video, Loïc Lemaire, with a YouTube channel on which he's talking about what's going on at Seesmic. This is a big deal. To me, it's a big deal because it reflects the fact that we're starting to understand that what we have here is a worldwide web a web that enables us to connect with one another in all kinds of places. So, um, stay tuned. This is going to get even more interesting. I know it is. So, uh, see you soon. Bye-bye.