I think you were dead-on with your assessment right up until your last paragraph where you say that Facebook doesn't want to be anything more than a brief time-

I think you were dead-on with your assessment right up until your last paragraph where you say that Facebook doesn't want to be anything more than a brief time-waster. I think they very clearly do want to be something much bigger, given their rhetoric "we're a social utility! we want to reward more productive apps! we want to be a platform for the social web and make information everywhere more open!" and given the tremendous financial incentive to do so. Does anyone think that FB would fetch anywhere near 15 billion if it were aspiring to be just a brief time waster and not a new major platform for the web? Not that the 15B was a real valuation, but you can bet they are still aiming that high. Anyway, I think that Facebook very much wants to be a new Microsoft, a platform for other valuable apps (if the apps that sit on top of Facebook aren't valuable, then the platform itself isn't very valuable), but they find themselves being stuck as a simple time-waster because that's what the bulk of their userbase wants.