The walls are still there. Facebook is still a roach motel for data and now they are going to be spanking platform developers whose apps are proving to be detrimental to Facebook's reputation and user experience. Same tune, different band.
It's not really surprising in either case I feel. For Facebook, their social network is their greatest value. For Apple, it's their experience.
It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.
Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.
I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.
[edited to move part to a different parent comment]
It's a reference to the old roach motel slogan: "Roaches check in, but they can't check out".
In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?
Almost everything in facebook is openly accessible via API if you've granted permissions to an applications to do so. We've seen services like Tweetdeck and Seesmic and Brizzly act like portals to the data.
Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.
I used to work for a social network that wanted to let users get their own photos out of Facebook and into our network. We built a Facebook app that expressly served this purpose; users only enabled it after knowing what it would do and desiring that consequence.
A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.
