11 ms·

To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses it". Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disapp

by frossie 15y ago

To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses it". Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest of us don't have a problem it can solve). Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but so is electricity. I think the analogy is if thousands of brilliant engineers were working for a fossil-fuel power company - it would be a natural reaction to say "Gee I wish all those boffins were working on renewable energy instead". You might not agree with it, but it is a legitimate sentiment.

temphn 15y ago
Respectfully disagree that Facebook has peaked. Once growth settles down at 700 million users or so, they will roll out service after service. Start thinking about all the things you could do with it. Overthrowing countries is just the beginning.
- frossie 15y ago
  You may be right that Facebook has not peaked, but saying Facebook overthrows countries is kinda like saying the inventor of the quill wrote the Declaration of Independence. Civil dissent overthrows governments. Ubiquitous communication methods certainly help organise civil dissent - but let's not forget that the French in 1789 managed it with pamphlets and soapboxes.
- dimitar 15y ago
  Facebook or twitter didn't overthrow anyone. Those are just communication tools and there plenty of those. Also Facebook sucks privacy-wise. You write something and everyone sees it. You don't want your police and ruling-party friends see your pics at a protest and criticizing your government. When people are already on the streets - then its on Facebook. Which is an effect not a cause.
  - equalarrow 15y ago
    This is true - FB/Twitter are just tools, just like the Internet is (or at least a platform). Social did not overthrow any governments, but it enabled people to communicate more effectively and thusly organize and do something about their situations. I was just down at FB headquarters last week. Great space. Tons of smart people. Tons. But... I used to be a big believer in FB, but after I started developing apps on their platform, I just started seeing things that I didn't like. You could log into one of our servers, flip on the logging, and just watch all kinds of crap from people I had no connection to scroll by. Besides the fact that most of it was pointless, mindless, drivel (I was saddened by humanity at this point), the fact that this was a 'workaround' around FB's privacy - I dunno, it didn't sit with me well. I haven't personally used FB in a while - over a year - and yet when I glance at my fiancé's wall, god, the most ridiculous crap is on there and it's consistent. I asked her "jesus, does anyone have a fucking life..?!". But beyond that, I just feel like FB is a talent vortex. I went around last week and met so many smart, excited people, yet, I felt they were just suckers. Sure, they're all going to be rich, no doubt about that. And maybe, some will leave to actually start revolutionary companies. But the fact that they're all there coding away on ways to make me the ad or figuring out more efficient ways to share my information (even if I specifically have said not to) - to me, it just seems a waste. It's great for Zuck because, after all, FB owns the copyright to so much of the things that are 'shared'. But it's not great for everyone else. It's not a 'social revolution', it's just about money and, really, conning it out of people in ways they don't understand (yet, ever?).
- 46Bit 15y ago
  Publish it's databases, in so doing likely revealing the private details of 400-600 million people and possibly giving enough details to hack/trick into their bank accounts without any problems? After all, a lot of people do fill out the data sections on Facebook - some people clearly don't find being asked to give it your life as well as your email password atall creepy. I for one welcome our new secretly spying overlords, etc.
wisty 15y ago
Facebook just doesn't have many engineers. "Over 2000 employees" (wikipedia says) just isn't that many. Compared that to Google (~20,000 to 30,000?), Microsoft (~90,000), or the IRS - over 100,000, or the Pentagon - 757,000. Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.
- ma2rten 15y ago
  Of those 2,000 employees only about 300 are actually engineers, if I recall correctly. But the point is, I guess, more about quality then quantity.
  - wisty 15y ago
    I think the real cost is in the ~50,000 engineers* who are trying to clone Facebook, not in the ~300 who are actually working on it. * Made up number.
    - adrianN 15y ago
      If they think they can make any serious amount of money by trying to beat Facebook at their own game, they aren't so bright, I think.
    - VMG 15y ago
      Assuming that number is very high, those people wouldn't necessarily be rocket surgeons if they weren't trying to clone FB
kahawe 15y ago
I think the point he made that "the internet is stale" resonates heavily with something I have always been feeling and wondering about the twitters, myspaces and facebooks... the whole "web 2.0" shenanigans. Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology". But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Actually, As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form. Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).
- skidooer 15y ago
  The Web 2.0 movement was about opening up the data in computer consumable formats and APIs. Nothing more. While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    Web 2.0 for me was mainly about user-generated content like blogs, wikis, social networking etc. You could do a lot if not all of that before as a tech and not-so-much tech but chances were that you did not. "Blog" made it hip and cool for everyone to write a lot about usually not a lot - but if you wanted to have a website you could very well do so before. I assume you mean RSS and what followed the blogs back then - but this was not really the main idea of Web 2.0. Web services were happening at the same time but they are not "the" web 2.0, in my opinion.
danking00 15y ago
I know three very bright, young graduates who have decided to enter the Financial industry (i.e. Algorithmic Trading). One has a Bachelor's in Physics & CS, another a Bachelor's in Physics & Math, and the other is finishing a PhD in Astrophysics. They view the Financial industry as an intellectually stimulating game (I don't disagree), and an opportunity to make 6-figures in their early 20s. This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life. My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad school and some sort of research be it academia or elsewhere.
- scythe 15y ago
  >This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. Every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is as bright as it gets. Until the rise of e.g. finance and actuarial science, getting a physics or math degree meant just going into academia. Now, with more demand for math or physics majors, there will be more demand for physics or math professors, which ultimately means more money going into math and physics research. The existence of the medical and legal professions contributes vastly to the funding of schools of medicine and law, and this is no different. It's good, not bad, that there are other things you can do with a degree in advanced mathematics besides "teach grad students advanced mathematics and vie for increasingly-scarce federal grant money". >I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life. It's too bad we don't live in a country full of self-sacrificing saints, huh?
  - jtheory 15y ago
    But, but, but... thanks to modern technology, aren't there so many better options for seriously smart folks with physics and math degrees? The "other" option isn't dusty academia and obscure research anymore. It also doesn't involve being a self-sacrificing saint and giving up any chance of ever having a nice car, though finance may still pay better in some cases than a high-math-content tech career.
JasonMoyMN79 15y ago
IAll those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook are totally pathetic. They are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people. Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?
FJCruiser79 15y ago
I disagree with the notion that "those who want it [Facebook] already have it..." In fact, there are billions of users that don't have access to Facebook but would benefit greatly from it. Many of these potential users have 1/2G mobile phones, with little or no access to a PC. Much of what Facebook needs to do to achieve growth targets will be extending it's platform to these users by creating a consumable experience on such technically limited devices. That takes innovation.
- JasonMoyMN79 15y ago
  Man, it's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people. Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?
nice1 15y ago
I agree with you (and the author of the article). However FB is not the only endeavor of this sort. I get exactly the same kind of feeling whenever I see a TV (in stores or friends' houses): obviously talented individuals (actors, script writers etc) devoting their energy to producing entertainment for morons. Such is the power of money ...

by frossie 15y ago

temphn 15y ago

Respectfully disagree that Facebook has peaked. Once growth settles down at 700 million users or so, they will roll out service after service. Start thinking about all the things you could do with it. Overthrowing countries is just the beginning.

frossie 15y ago
You may be right that Facebook has not peaked, but saying Facebook overthrows countries is kinda like saying the inventor of the quill wrote the Declaration of Independence. Civil dissent overthrows governments. Ubiquitous communication methods certainly help organise civil dissent - but let's not forget that the French in 1789 managed it with pamphlets and soapboxes.
dimitar 15y ago
Facebook or twitter didn't overthrow anyone. Those are just communication tools and there plenty of those. Also Facebook sucks privacy-wise. You write something and everyone sees it. You don't want your police and ruling-party friends see your pics at a protest and criticizing your government. When people are already on the streets - then its on Facebook. Which is an effect not a cause.
- equalarrow 15y ago
  This is true - FB/Twitter are just tools, just like the Internet is (or at least a platform). Social did not overthrow any governments, but it enabled people to communicate more effectively and thusly organize and do something about their situations. I was just down at FB headquarters last week. Great space. Tons of smart people. Tons. But... I used to be a big believer in FB, but after I started developing apps on their platform, I just started seeing things that I didn't like. You could log into one of our servers, flip on the logging, and just watch all kinds of crap from people I had no connection to scroll by. Besides the fact that most of it was pointless, mindless, drivel (I was saddened by humanity at this point), the fact that this was a 'workaround' around FB's privacy - I dunno, it didn't sit with me well. I haven't personally used FB in a while - over a year - and yet when I glance at my fiancé's wall, god, the most ridiculous crap is on there and it's consistent. I asked her "jesus, does anyone have a fucking life..?!". But beyond that, I just feel like FB is a talent vortex. I went around last week and met so many smart, excited people, yet, I felt they were just suckers. Sure, they're all going to be rich, no doubt about that. And maybe, some will leave to actually start revolutionary companies. But the fact that they're all there coding away on ways to make me the ad or figuring out more efficient ways to share my information (even if I specifically have said not to) - to me, it just seems a waste. It's great for Zuck because, after all, FB owns the copyright to so much of the things that are 'shared'. But it's not great for everyone else. It's not a 'social revolution', it's just about money and, really, conning it out of people in ways they don't understand (yet, ever?).
46Bit 15y ago
Publish it's databases, in so doing likely revealing the private details of 400-600 million people and possibly giving enough details to hack/trick into their bank accounts without any problems? After all, a lot of people do fill out the data sections on Facebook - some people clearly don't find being asked to give it your life as well as your email password atall creepy. I for one welcome our new secretly spying overlords, etc.

wisty 15y ago

Facebook just doesn't have many engineers. "Over 2000 employees" (wikipedia says) just isn't that many. Compared that to Google (~20,000 to 30,000?), Microsoft (~90,000), or the IRS - over 100,000, or the Pentagon - 757,000. Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.

ma2rten 15y ago
Of those 2,000 employees only about 300 are actually engineers, if I recall correctly. But the point is, I guess, more about quality then quantity.
- wisty 15y ago
  I think the real cost is in the ~50,000 engineers* who are trying to clone Facebook, not in the ~300 who are actually working on it. * Made up number.
  - adrianN 15y ago
    If they think they can make any serious amount of money by trying to beat Facebook at their own game, they aren't so bright, I think.
  - VMG 15y ago
    Assuming that number is very high, those people wouldn't necessarily be rocket surgeons if they weren't trying to clone FB

kahawe 15y ago

I think the point he made that "the internet is stale" resonates heavily with something I have always been feeling and wondering about the twitters, myspaces and facebooks... the whole "web 2.0" shenanigans. Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology". But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.

joe_the_user 15y ago
Actually, As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form. Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).
skidooer 15y ago
The Web 2.0 movement was about opening up the data in computer consumable formats and APIs. Nothing more. While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.
- kahawe 15y ago
  Web 2.0 for me was mainly about user-generated content like blogs, wikis, social networking etc. You could do a lot if not all of that before as a tech and not-so-much tech but chances were that you did not. "Blog" made it hip and cool for everyone to write a lot about usually not a lot - but if you wanted to have a website you could very well do so before. I assume you mean RSS and what followed the blogs back then - but this was not really the main idea of Web 2.0. Web services were happening at the same time but they are not "the" web 2.0, in my opinion.

danking00 15y ago

I know three very bright, young graduates who have decided to enter the Financial industry (i.e. Algorithmic Trading). One has a Bachelor's in Physics & CS, another a Bachelor's in Physics & Math, and the other is finishing a PhD in Astrophysics. They view the Financial industry as an intellectually stimulating game (I don't disagree), and an opportunity to make 6-figures in their early 20s. This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life. My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad school and some sort of research be it academia or elsewhere.

scythe 15y ago
>This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. Every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is as bright as it gets. Until the rise of e.g. finance and actuarial science, getting a physics or math degree meant just going into academia. Now, with more demand for math or physics majors, there will be more demand for physics or math professors, which ultimately means more money going into math and physics research. The existence of the medical and legal professions contributes vastly to the funding of schools of medicine and law, and this is no different. It's good, not bad, that there are other things you can do with a degree in advanced mathematics besides "teach grad students advanced mathematics and vie for increasingly-scarce federal grant money". >I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life. It's too bad we don't live in a country full of self-sacrificing saints, huh?
- jtheory 15y ago
  But, but, but... thanks to modern technology, aren't there so many better options for seriously smart folks with physics and math degrees? The "other" option isn't dusty academia and obscure research anymore. It also doesn't involve being a self-sacrificing saint and giving up any chance of ever having a nice car, though finance may still pay better in some cases than a high-math-content tech career.

JasonMoyMN79 15y ago

IAll those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook are totally pathetic. They are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people. Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?

FJCruiser79 15y ago

I disagree with the notion that "those who want it [Facebook] already have it..." In fact, there are billions of users that don't have access to Facebook but would benefit greatly from it. Many of these potential users have 1/2G mobile phones, with little or no access to a PC. Much of what Facebook needs to do to achieve growth targets will be extending it's platform to these users by creating a consumable experience on such technically limited devices. That takes innovation.

JasonMoyMN79 15y ago
Man, it's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people. Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?

nice1 15y ago

I agree with you (and the author of the article). However FB is not the only endeavor of this sort. I get exactly the same kind of feeling whenever I see a TV (in stores or friends' houses): obviously talented individuals (actors, script writers etc) devoting their energy to producing entertainment for morons. Such is the power of money ...