Jakob Nielsen has it so very, very wrong
I like Jakob Nielsen and his advice on website usability has gone a long way for me in my professional career, but this bit from his most recent newsletter is so incredibly wrong:
Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It’ll fail again.
I’m not sure how he could miss the glaring differences between the sites of ten years ago, where “walled garden” meant making sure that no one left the site for any reason ever. But Facebook is totally different. There are tons of applications from other sites all over Facebook. Yes, it’s all contained on one site, but it’s not walled in anywhere near the same way that sites ten years ago were. Nielsen just ends up sounding kind of…ancient.
