Facebook becoming a walled garden?

Back in July 2008, Facebook added the ability to take content you published elsewhere on the Internet and make it available to your friends on Facebook. I really liked this design and made use of it despite the flakiness of Facebook's implementation.

Yesterday, Facebook informed users that they were killing this feature on 22 November 2011.

Websites killing off features is nothing new but I'm disappointed for a number of reasons...

1. Lack of notice
   Just 11 days notice that the feature is going away... Companies tend to favour informing users a minimum of 30 days before making changes that affected them. On the plus side, Facebook have been known to "disappear" features within any notice at all so this actually an improvement!
   
   
2. Increased effort required
   This is a feature that many companies and organisations use for posting content in one location and making it appear in other locations on the website. This saves people a huge amount of time because they don't have to write the content and then sign into multiple sites to make the content appear there.
   
   
3. Longer term implications
   One of the suggested motivations for this is that Facebook want publishers and consumers to spend the majority of their time on the site. The more time they spend on the site, the more they are worth. I really don't want Facebook (or any other provider) to become the only place information is available. Locking users into a particular website never ends well...

I wonder if notes will completely die as a feature for Facebook... Two of the main use cases for the notes feature are blog postings that are imported from outside Facebook and status updates that are too long.

Will be interesting to see where this goes...