> I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. > often it feels like each website is

> I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. > often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. In between these two sentences you highlight something important. At a certain point, it stops mattering what exists. All that matters is what you need. Technophiles love trying out tools and imagining ways they can put them to use. It's fun, but it's also entirely unnecessary. (The unnecessariness is part of the fun!) If you're not a geek about this sort of thing, though, then all you need are the things which somehow extend your life in meaningful ways. What worries me more than anything about startup culture is that by emphasizing the creation itself rather than the motive behind the creation, it often leaves people with the impression that the point of making a startup is to make a startup. And while many people do find success with that route, its opposite approach – live your life until you find something out of place, then build what you need to fix it – is much more commonplace, and often much more effective. Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook fame, built a music player in high school because he wanted music recommendations. Released it for free rather than sell it to Microsoft, because it was about fixing a problem, not making money. Now read his letter to investors [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/]. He emphasizes again and again that Facebook was built to solve a problem: "We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other." Whether you think he's going about this the right way, it's clear that he built Facebook with this intent in mind. Its innovations have all been on this front. He didn't see MySpace and think, "how can I tweak this and steal their marketshare?", like many many other social networks did. He saw a social value in networking and sought to make a service that would fundamentally revolve around that value. I use a number of services; my friends (mostly college-aged) and I overlap and diverge in a number of ways. What matters to us is our friendship. We use the software that'll let us interact in ways that we care about. Some of us even turn off our phones when we see each other in person. It's crazy!