Facebook Garage: Hating Facebook

Enter Annika Lidne, from Lidne Inc. She is here to talk about hwy she loves social media and hate Facebook. Again I didn’t take notes (but next one and forward I did).

Annika starts with the walled garden effect and AOL. I have never heard about the walled garden effect, but knew about AOL and how it was the gran daddy of Internet (in USA) a decade ago. Basically the walled garden effect (for those who don’t know) it’s a closed set of services provided to users, such as Facebook. They want everybody and everything to stay in Facebook, because they revenue comes from on ads on Facebook. The problem with this is that sooner or later something better comes or people get sick of being “taken hostage” in this beautiful walled garden, so they leave. Such as it happened with AOL, since users needed to navigate the Internet through their browser. This  also was a pain for content providers because they needed to fit AOL requirements.

For more on walled garden check out this post. Here is a guy starts on justifying why he refuses to participate in social networks, which leads to the walled garden discussion.

Annika talked about how this is a women’s world since there are more girl or woman bloggers than men (she gave stats for Sweden, not the world which is suspicious since women in Sweden kick ass), the same with social network activity. But she forgot to mention that men still rule, even if there is a shift, we still rule (sorry but is true and it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, but its true.)

Girls dominating social media should not be a surprise, since girls (in their teens especially) have this tendency to talk a lot. Remember back in the days when there was no internet, and how girls will also monopolized the phone for hours, talking and talking. Same today, but they got IM, SMS, they got social networks and now they figured out that blogs are a way to expressed out of the “walled garden”. All the  tools mentioned  above, help keep in touch with most of their friends on the same time, which is a way of life and not just a phase.

Teenage girls want to express themselves in so many ways; in contrast boys are happy with their video games and porn. (Yes I said porn and I don’t think today with the Internet a teenage boy haven’t seen a naked women in some way.)

For those that where at Facebook Garage, you may remember the presentation highlight was in the Q&A, when a guy monopolized it by attacking here and questioning why she hated Facebook. The guy needed a chill pill, since it looked like a vendetta against Annika. It just show how people are different and need different things. So if you need something more personalized and don’t have what it takes to do a social network from the scratch, maybe you can make one at Ning. At Ning you can create a  social network of anything, for example nustart students at KTH, Olimpia fans in La Ceiba or I want to learn Swedish but I’m lazy social network. I guess you got the point.

At the end of the day maybe Facebook is doomed, but blogs will live another day and that is why they state that the next social network will be wordpress.