I think my main problem with the article is that the three big, meaningful problems it presents are so vague as to be virtually unsolvable. Let's use facebook

I think my main problem with the article is that the three big, meaningful problems it presents are so vague as to be virtually unsolvable. Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem. The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve. Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable. I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.