It struck me that one of the things that many of the social networks and social media cognoscenti do is remove boundaries. Mark Zukerberg and Facebook unbounded their code and made applications applications and extensions a significant part of their system. Now most of it is written by developers, in an unbounded framework.
Then the guys at Apple unbounded their developers with the App Store as part of iTunes and the iPhone unbounded the transactional element of applications and made them easily monetisable, so unbounding time for developers to devote to the application. They unbounded payments as well and with further in application (optional) charging just around the corner they’ll unbound that further still. 35,000 apps and counting – 1 Billion downloads.
Twitter’s developers unbounded short text and released an API that enabled a myriad of ways to view and add to the twitterverse. So Tweetdeck, Tweetmeme, Tweetie and many others were born. Search, trends, location and more – all being unbounded faster than ever.
Bounders create closed, selective and controlled environments, Un-bounders free the space for others to deliver outstanding, and unexpected results. Bounders control, un-bounders collaborate. Bounders are selective, un-bounders are supportive.
A question we must each ask, in this Societal Web World is whether we are “bounders” or “un-bounders”.
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