More on the topic of social networks as walled gardens from the Cornucopt Dev Log.

“Systems like Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tribe.net and on and on all have inflated opinions of their own utility, and most are closed to outside use anyway. They don’t even make good use of the rest of the net themselves; they’re walled gardens.

No, the social networking systems I’m interested in 1) haven’t been built yet, and 2) will have, in true small-pieces-loosely-joined fashion, deliberately low utility by themselves.”

If you rethink a social network as a web service designed in a modular fashion to interoperate with other web services, the walls of the garden dissolve.

For example, I could my extended network as a filter on incoming email– without having to reinvent email or convert everyone I know to my social networking religion.

Or as Jon Udell notes in the on-demand blogosphere,

“What if the blogs we read didn’t just scroll past us in our RSS inboxes? What if we could consult the wisdom of our networks of bloggers on demand, in realtime, relative to topics of current interest? And what if we could consult their networks too? “

The barriers to social network as web service are significant. Existing social networks want to to be a web destination that serves advertising, and are resistant to the idea of someone else applying a different skin and integrating additional functionality into their platform.

In upcoming posts I’ll give more thoughts on how such a service might attain critical mass and traction.