The beauty of launching an application like Walletproof on the web is its cross-platform interoperability. As long as a user has a web browser, he’s set.

In a recent post titled Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke makes an interesting point about Facebook’s development platform and how its “walled garden” approach might represent a negative trend: If every big player on the web offers their own closed proprietary platform for developers to launch their products on, it becomes inefficient and expensive.

It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously … imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of the excellent Business 2.0, discusses this in The Race to Become the Next AOL and he links to a story in the Financial Times where one of MySpace’s founders says they’ll probably follow Facebook’s lead and introduce their own development platform.

An example of a more constructive approach is the platform Netvibes launched recently for developing widgets: Netvibes UWA. They emphasise openness and if you write a widget for Netvibes, it will work in iGoogle, the Apple Dashboard and “many more”.

Creating walled gardens like the Facebook development platform may well make sense as a business decision. One thing is certain though, it won’t benefit the consumer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Business, Technology, The Web as a platform, Walletproof. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.