Leaky Garden shows which ‘walled gardens’ leak, and which are watertight. Social network sites and other Web 2.0 services with usernames and logins are analyzed for the amount of indexed items in Google. How often have the usernames from the 2.0 sites been indexed by Google? Leaky Garden shows the quantity of leaks per 2.0 service.
Username queries are made via usernamecheck.com*, a service that looks up whether usernames are already taken. Usernamecheck.com has been re-used in order to trace which services are being used by a particular username. Usernamecheck.com’s results are scraped. Google is queried for the username in each Web 2.0 site in question.
The Leaky Garden project is a production of the Govcom.org Foundation in collaboration with the Digital Methods Initiative. The project was conducted at the Walled Garden event, November 2008, organized by Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam.