In the wake of the new Facebook privacy settings that have many fretting that Facebook is becoming too open, C-Net’s Matt Asay asks whether or not it might still be too closed. Many of us recall the early days of the Internet where providers like Compuserve and AOL created “walled gardens”. In essence, little fenced off sections of the network that were inaccessible unless you were a member of that particular service. The advent of service providers like Yahoo! that were independent of ISPs led consumers quickly to the conclusion that there was value in open unfettered communication. The garden walls quickly fell.

However, Asay is wondering if tools like Facebook are creating the same problem all over again. He cites a problem near and dear to me where a blogger has posted a piece on his blog where it’s available for all the world to see, but most of the interesting commentary is on the corresponding Facebook post which is only open to his friends. While I see the similarity Asay is going for, I think it’s really a different problem.

Facebook addresses a need that’s different than blogs and different than Twitter. It does create walled groups of friends, and I would contend that for a lot of the content posted there, this is appropriate. The difficulty is that some of us have a variety of portals to which we broadcast a variety of content. And that content is intended for different audiences.

In my case, I have this blog that I’ve run for many years. The content here is intended for a broad audience, and is open for everyone. Further, the blog provides for reader commentary and discussion. For the convenience of my readers, the posts to that blog are available as an RSS feed, a Twitter feed, or on Facebook. It’s all the same content, it’s just in all those places because people have different preferences for how they access my posts.

Because it is my personal blog, I don’t have separate Facebook pages set up for the blog and my personal page. It’s all one, and it’s not open. If you want to read my blog on Facebook, you have to be my friend. Why not open my Facebook page up? Simply because there are things post on FB that I don’t blog. Things that are related to my kids or updates that while not secret would have no interest to a larger audience. I like the distinction between the walled FB world and the open blog. The only thing that messes it up is the commentary.

Ever since pushing my blog posts to Facebook, the comments on the blog page have decreased significantly. A lot of that discussion now seems to take place on Facebook. And a lot of that discussion I think would be interesting to other non-Facebook readers. But they will never see it.

While opening up my Facebook page to the world would be one solution, I don’t think it really fixes the problem. Non-Facebook readers are not likely to try and locate the corresponding Facebook entry in order to read the comments. The better solution would seem to be having Facebook distinguish between native-generated and imported content. Native content would be handled as it is today. Imported content would allow for the export of the commentary to other vehicles like blogs. In that way, my posts would continue to be imported into Facebook, and the Facebook commentary would be exported back out and placed on my blog.

This is the best of both worlds, and I think more sensible than prying Facebook open so all the world knows when you’re doing laundry.