In response to Michael Arrington’s post at Techcrunch about the exclusivity of certain walled communities, Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web is arguing that such an exclusivity is needed to establish the trust. I completely disagree with Bernard that you need a gated community to establish trust. You don’t have to be exclusive to have a trust. The trust inside an exclusive walled community is as good as the weakest node that has entered inside the community through their established invitation process. Also, there is no widespread distrust between the members of the open communities. The trust is a result of how well you define the relationship with other members.

Even if you take an open approach like Robert Scoble’s, you can still establish trust based on how you build the relationships in the social networks by scrutinizing the “interactions” with the other person deeply. In fact, trust in social networks is not a hardcore social problem, as Bernard tries to portray in the article, it is more of a technological problem. With valid tools like fine grained privacy control and customization, you can establish the trust with each and every social networking contact on an individual basis. This, in turn, has the potential to increase the overall trust inside the entire social networking community. In short, the trust factor in social networks boils down to just how you define your relationship with the other individual and what are the tools available at your disposal to fine tune this relationship. The open or closed nature of the social network is not at all vital in establishing the trust. The walled communities only help maintain the exclusivity of its members. Let us take the facebook example. When it was a semi-walled garden, allowing only people with a .edu email address, the only purpose of this wall was to ensure that it is an exclusive network of just college students. When they opened it to general public, they removed the exclusivity and made it accessible to everyone. There are no studies that indicates any reduction of trust within the facebook after they tore down their walled gardens. In fact, the opening up of the network and the eventual opening up of the platform for app developers, helped facebook grow into a bigger and stronger company. However, the walled nature has a potential to discriminate against those people who might, otherwise, belong to the exclusive club. The walled gardens also limit the people who want to reach out much like what Robert Scoble does. If I am an entrepreneur planning to build a social network, whether it is for general public or a niche community, I would take the open network approach than walled community approach. I will then build all the technological tools necessary for the users to establish the trust with their contacts. In fact, I would argue that Michael Arrington has got it right and hence his rant against exclusive communities. What do you think?