Examples
Some examples of walled gardens:
- Amazon. The Amazon Kindle line of eReaders uses a walled garden. As an October 2011 Business Insider article, titled "How Amazon Makes Money From The Kindle" observes: "Amazon's Kindle is no longer just a product: It's a whole ecosystem." Moreover, "The Kindle ecosystem is also Amazon's fastest-growing product and could account for more than 10% of the company's revenue next year."
- America Online. AOL started its business with revenue-sharing agreements with certain information providers in their subscriber-only space.
- Apple iOS and other devices restricted to running pre-approved applications from a digital distribution service.
- Barnes and Noble. In late December 2011, B&N began pushing the automatic, over-the-air firmware update 1.4.1 to Nook Tablets that removed users' ability to gain root access to the device and the ability to sideload applications from sources other than the official Barnes and Noble NOOK Store (without modding).
- CompuServe
- Facebook's growth is aided by large amounts of content hidden behind login screens. Such content is said to be in a Walled Garden, inaccessible to general Internet users.
- Full Service Network. A pilot project from Time Warner in the early 1990s, this was an early interactive television system that provided residents of Orlando, Florida, access to online shopping, grocery order and United States Postal Service.
- Video game consoles have a long history of walled gardens, with developers needing to purchase licenses to develop for the platform, and in some cases needing editorial approval from the console manufacturer prior to publishing games.
- Yahoo! GeoCities was a site with "neighborhoods" where users could set up free Web pages using templates provided by GeoCities. Custom design of static pages was possible, but functionality of sites was somewhat restricted due to lack of server-side programming support. The North American version was closed by Yahoo! at the end of October 2009, although the Japanese version continued to operate.
Read more about this topic: Closed Platform
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