More than a decade later, walled gardens appear to be making a comeback. Facebook, for example, is one such garden where everyone who plays within it—members, merchants, and developers—plays by the rules set forth by a single company. Apple’s iOS applications constitute another type of walled garden: apps for magazines and newspapers present the content in a format designed for a specific piece of hardware and display. Some consumers and usability advocates applaud the clean and elegant user experience, but the trade-off is that merchants and publishers must again play by the rules of a single intermediary—in this case, Apple.
For all their benefits, walled gardens limit competition and choice. In a recent commentary for Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, warned against the rise of these “closed worlds” because they give control of content to individual companies, rather than keeping it open and universally available, as web addresses are.
Trecho do relatório “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity“. (O’Reilly Radar. Tim O’Brien, Dave Sims, and the O’Reilly Radar Team.)
Esse trecho dialoga com a análise de Chris Anderson sobre a “morte da web” e a força dos aplicativos.