Amen. For all the buzz about "Facebook apps", has anyone looked at most of these things? Bug-ridden, ugly, utter shit. Facebook is slouching toward the Gomorra

Amen. For all the buzz about "Facebook apps", has anyone looked at most of these things? Bug-ridden, ugly, utter shit. Facebook is slouching toward the Gomorrah of clutter. I hope something better comes along. I never liked Facebook (originally Thefacebook, lulz-on-a-vomit-pie) or that Zuckerberg clown, and I only use it because my friends do. Sheep-throwing is a case of the exception attempting to drive the rule. SuperPoke is a mediocre idea that has achieved some measure of viral success. It makes "success" (high user count) look easy, and that's a catchy idea to many people. Does the "Million Dollar Homepage" really scale? Of course not, but it's an attractive idea that some kid out there can make $1m from a mediocre, one-flash concept. With the right infrastructure and some luck, mediocre ideas can lead to smashing success, even reliably. Take the board game Monopoly. The design of the game is quite primitive; not nearly on the level of Settlers of Catan, much less Tigris and Euphrates or Puerto Rico. But mass-producing and marketing a board game during the Great Depression was not easy, and there was a high barrier to entry, so the designer who was able to surmount this barrier was able to collect. Now that the barrier to entry for most ideas is low, the mediocre ideas that achieve lasting success are going to be very rare. In terms of the money and talent being wasted on mediocre ideas, one source of this problem is inherent to the VC culture. MBAs, by definition, are risk-averse people. It's an incredibly risk-averse move to trade two years and $100,000 (if you have, or can borrow, the money) for an assurance of elevated career status. Elite MBA programs are, compared to similar law, medical, or PhD programs, extremely unselective, and getting an MBA is a way to reach the executive level by (wait for it) schmoozing and taking classes-- in other words, without accomplishing or risking anything. To the extent that most VCs are elite MBAs, of course they're going to be throwing their money after me-too social networking sites, which can be compared to other such sites on paper-- rather than original ideas that only the marketplace can evaluate. Investing money in social networking and "Web 2.0" is like buying the proverbial IBM, for which nobody was ever fired.