Hey, it’s not my prediction! I’m taking some factors Bill Burnham mentioned in reference to walled gardens and Homestore, Monster, EBay, Match.com and riffing on them:

1. Content Availability: Generally speaking, the more “self published”, publicly index-able data there is, the more vulnerable the walled garden.  As I mentioned in my prior post, 10 years ago very few people/businesses had their own web site.  Today, the situation is dramatically different with most businesses and an increasing number of people having their own sites.  Almost all of these sites are not password protected and can therefore be fully indexed by search engines.   If a Walled Garden is charging to distribute or provide access to data that can now be easily aggregated from “self published” web sites, it is in an increasingly tenuous position.
2. Index Affinity: The more willing a data owner is to make their data available for indexing, the more tenuous the walled garden’s business.  In most cases data owners are quite content to disseminate their information as widely as possible, however there are some cases where limited distribution of data is preferable.   
3. Process Simplicity:  Walled gardens can create value by not only aggregating and displaying data, but also by providing a process for acting on that data.    The more complex the process, the more value the garden is adding to the overall transaction.  Conversely, if a garden has a highly simplistic process where it simply displays aggregated information, it is highly vulnerable to search led attacks.

Don’t these factors apply to del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, RawSugar (sorry Bill), Wink, Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0, or even MySpace? In fact, how about any service that asks me to sign up for an account, and to post content to it, that I already post – or want to post – on my blog?

Lets review those factors again:

* Content Availability: Generally speaking, the more “self published”, publicly index-able data there is, the more vulnerable the walled garden. As I mentioned in my prior post, 10 years ago very few people/businesses had their own web site.

On a blog it’s: Easy to post photos. Easy to post links. Easy to post text. Getting easier to post files of all sorts. Why should I post twice, three times, four times?

* Index Affinity: The more willing a data owner is to make their data available for indexing, the more tenuous the walled garden’s business.

That’s what bloggers do every day with links, photos, stories, etc. Bloggers encourage and want their data indexable. We even ping services the second we post new work to alert them we have updated so they can come and do just that. RSS and pinging have, in the words of Technorati, enabled the “world live web”.

* Process Simplicity: Walled gardens can create value by not only aggregating and displaying data, but also by providing a process for acting on that data.

See Moveable Type and WordPress. Then see any RSS reader: In particular My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Newsgator, FeedDemon, netnewswire, or any aggregator by Dave Winer. Yahoo! 360 has potential as well since it accepts feeds I can share.

In my mind, Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, RawSugar, Wink, and MySpace provide social glue. There is huge value in how they aggregate and enable you to use what folks share. The value builds the more you use them. Each of these services rock.

But I’m getting tired of having twenty accounts to do what I can do from my blog. I know I’m not alone in this.

So some predictions (putting a pundit hat on – how scary!):

I actually don’t think these services are going to die because it’s so damn easy to aggregate! It’s very, very easy. At least on a smaller scale. And when you grow larger there is an expanding list of services to help.

So why can’t Digg pick up the latest post from my blog and put it in its queue for moderation – instead of me posting directly to it? Why can’t Albert post photos to his blog and have them show up at Flickr?

Trust. At Philly Future we handle it manually. We are intimately, socially involved in our community. TailRank, asks you to import your OPML file – the list of blogs you personally trust. Memeorandum starts its crawl from a list of selected blogs and goes from there. I imagine new services will come along to help shortly.

So prediction one: These services will provide tools to reverse the flow and enable you to post to your blog, having your participation shared there (see Technorati).

Prediction two: Any new service that intends to compete with Digg, Flickr, del.icio.us, and similar, that don’t recognize Bill Burnham’s walled garden factors will fail.

RSS syndication and tagging, with the upcoming additions of structured blogging and microformats are changing everything.

It’s about sharing with your circle of friends, your community, and if you want, your world. Hasn’t it always been?

In many ways, Memeorandum, and Tail Rank, and TagCloud are hinting at the future. And MySpace actually, if it doesn’t screw up, is in a good place since it’s used more as a primary blogging presence then as an additional outlet. And more than that, it’s becoming a brand.

But boy is this a brual post. Personally, it speaks to where I want to take Philly Future: Right now there needs to be some original works posted to provide focus – but long term – those original works should only come from your blogs, and Philly Future should provide additional functionality to share and to highlight them without repeating yourself in anyway.

This post follows related posts at Jeff Jarvis’s and David Weinberger’s (who is looking for service examples that allow you to use your social network as your news filter).

So the title of this post was a vain attempt to copy from folks like Jeremy and use a provocative headline to get you to read. It work?