The Walled Garden- Why Synchronization is needed

For as long as the Internet has been around, there have been companies attempting to keep you glued to their own little world.  In the early days, there was Prodigy, CompuServe, and the big bad of bunch, AOL.  Now, we have Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Live, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc...  While each allow you to connect to the outside world, they would prefer to you stay glued to their tiny piece of the Internet because the more eyes they can control, the more revenue they can bring in.

If you have the Facebook application on your Blackberry, iPhone, or Android phone, you have probably already seen an example of this.  When you go into the app, I bet you noticed that you can view your friend's phone number, email address, job title, company, etc.., BUT that information does not get copied into your phone's address book.  If you want one of your friend's Facebook phone numbers in your address book, you have to manually copy it, and then paste it.  To date, while I have yet to find out whether this is a limitation of the device's development platform, but current murmurs on the Internet lead one to believe that this is Facebook's choice to keep you within their system.

Another example of these restrictions is how Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo work with a wide range of social networks.  If you log into Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, you'll see that each one has an option to pull in all your email contacts from your webbased address book and see if they already have an existing account within that particular network.  

Gmail/Yahoo/AOL >> Twitter

Gmail >>> Facebook

Hotmail >> Facebook

Yahoo >> Facebook

Instant Messaging Clients >> Facebook

Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail/AOL >> LinkedIn

Then, these social networks will send a request to connect with these people on that network.  However, keep in mind that this information only goes ONE-WAY.  If someone changes their phone number or email address in Facebook or their Title/Job/Company on LinkedIn, that information is NOT sent back to your address book.  The only way to update this information is by hand, and requires you to pay attention to the changes of your contacts.

For example, LinkedIn lets you MANUALLY export your contacts' information:

These companies say that this is for privacy concerns as part of their terms of service, but I have to wonder whether they realize that the need is there.  The public didn't demand music free of DRM until they realized that they could move the tracks they bought in iTunes to other MP3 players.  Now is the time for the public revolt against the PIM walled garden.

Facebook put a dent in this when they started to allow the exporting of your friends' email addresses to Yahoo, but that is only a start.  There is a long way to go before this is universal, if ever.

This is one of the many reasons why synchronization exists.  By using a third-party service in the cloud, you can pull in all these pieces of information from various sources, and combine them into one centralized location.  Unfortunately, there is no synchronization service that tracks everything because there is no standard address book that will track everything.  Or, at the very least, not until the Open-Source SyncML finally catches on......