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My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world), without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to travel.
I respect that folks don't find a lot of value in FB. It isn't quite my cup of tea either. But don't make the engineer's mistake of assuming "Since I don't use it, nobody uses it" or "Nobody's use of this is important to them."
Also, one shouldn't let one's position in the tech echo chamber cause one to overestimate how much resources Facebook really gets from society. Their annual operating budget is, what, the size of the school districts in one midsize US city or the IT department of a single large bank? Don't worry, we will still have brains to spare after someone does an A/B test on poking.
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.
It's an interesting point. At my day job, I had an extensive discussion with a coworker who spends his days in sales and marketing. I was telling him that I'm not really the right person to talk to about marketing campaigns on the Internet because I'm virtually immune to them. Even on systems without adblock on, I rarely notice advertisements and I don't think I've ever clicked one. I don't like talking to sales people in stores because I generally don't gain anything by the interaction. And I have no idea what popular commercials are because I automatically blank them out of my perception.
Apparently, my aversion to advertising is so strong that FB doesn't even put any on my page.
He was aghast.
He ran down a list of current commercials for popular products, ones that he had been paying attention to, nothing.
We went to his Facebook page and his was full of advertisements, mine? Not a one.
"How was this possible? I'm starting to have doubts about the effectiveness of an ad campaign?"
It was then that we both realized that FB and Google are almost entirely ad supported and I must be a very bizarre outlier, never to be used as a benchmark for ad effectiveness.
I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate.
The truth is, Facebook obviously provides some value, since people use it. But because of the sheer number of users using it, the value it provides is multiplied by a lot. The overall value to the world is huge, simply because so many people derive value from it.
I do agree that we hear more about FB because it's highly visible. My friend once told me that a startup that could make the world a whole lot better, is to create something that improves traffic conditions by 10%. Especially in countries with heavy traffic, this would literally save millions of hours for people. But it's not a "sexy" field, so it's doubtful anyone would ever hear about it.
P.S. Sorry to hear about your mother, hope she's doing well.
A family friend of mine has been hospital-bound for quite some time. He just got an iPad and the two things he asked to be set up were email and Facebook.
I asked if he wanted any apps or movies. He said those would be nice, but he needed email and Facebook.
Facebook gets lots of resources: really smart engineers (worth much more than their salary) and tons of time/attention (that could have been spent on worthier pursuits than Farmville). It's not just cash.
(Your estimate of their cash impact is mostly correct, though: $2B in revenues for Facebook, http://schoolcenter.k12albemarle.org/education/components/la...; claims to serve ~12.000 kids in a county on ~$145M requested budget, and I could see a city having ten times as many kids.)
Perhaps it should refer to all the brilliant people in %90 of web startups in general. The majority of Silicon Valley's (NYC perhaps even more so) recent output is fluff, stuff that impacts people's lives about the same as drugstore celebrity mags.
(But it's not a new trend, TV or advertising or law or finance are/were similar in that respect.)
The majority of everything has always been fluff. It's just we remember those parts of the past that weren't fluff, and forget 97% of it. Otherwise our heads would be entirely fluff.
I vividly remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, just about the time I was getting married. Until this spring, I had a similar tendency to think that geopolitics "nowadays" was drab and boring. Evolutionary punctuation only just happens so often, but that doesn't mean evolution has come to a screeching halt. (Or rather, it has - just that it will continue with a screeching lurch when it's good and ready.)
It's easy to under-estimate the value web technologies provide their users, because it's hard to visualise large numbers of people. It's the well known "your brain doesn't naturally multiply" problem.
Let's say you have a technology product that does something pretty trivial, but has non-zero value. Let's say you do something that's worth about 30c per day of utility to each user. If you give this value to 10 million users, you're creating about $3 million of value every day --- or $1 billion of value a year.
That value doesn't seem nearly as real as the equivalent value deployed to a smaller group of people. But that's just because 10 million people is impossible to visualise. The value is still totally real though, despite your lack of intuition for it.
If you believe Facebook delivers little total value, then you must believe its value to individual users is almost totally nil, simply because of the enormous number of people who use the service daily.
Even if you don't like Facebook much, can you really argue that it's delivering _nothing_ to its average user? It's not delivering _any_ value to them at all?
Facebook has 500 million users, and 250 million daily unique logins. If logging on to Facebook delivers even a single cent of value, the total value delivered by each Facebook engineer is already going to be staggering.
1c is an enormous underestimate of what people actually get from the service, but let's run with this. At 1c per login, it's delivering $25 million per day. It has 2000 employees, so each employee is delivering an average of $12.5k per day. I'd actually put the value-per-login at over $1, which would take the average contribution to over $1 million per day.
People would be wise to think carefully before questioning the way markets are allocating capital and drawing in talent. There are certainly cases where the capital allocation is inefficient, but there are also cases where your mental heuristics give you blind-spots.
I am not comparing Facebook to meth, but I just want to point out that the same form of argument you just made would also apply to meth.
Personally, what I'd like to discuss is if there is any moral value that Facebook provides. Does Facebook actually benefit society? (Maybe more precisely we can ask whether Facebook fulfills an aspect of Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
I just keep hearing the word 'value' used over and over here and it frustrates me that it is so often only associated with 'business value' rather than something more morally significant.
They are doing useful things, they're helping create scalable technology that can serve 600 million people. Cassandra, HipHop, Thrift, etc are all products from those minds. In addition the kinds of problems they are solving, such as creating a platform for third party integration can be applied to many different other areas. So yeah they're working on a social network, but all the while all this good stuff is happening that we all can benefit from...without a facebook account (I don't have one).
I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting:
http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
> I am in no way suggesting that almost 600 million people are wrong. The massive and highly engaged Facebook user base clearly gets value and satisfaction from the product. I am also in no way critical or judgmental about those who find value there. Good for them! But for me, there are so many other unsolved problems in the world, and they have little to do with social.
Hot tip: whenever anybody writes "I am in no way suggesting <X>", the chance that they are suggesting <X> approaches 100%.
Is it any worse than the reams of medical researchers working on giving old affluent men hard-ons and their hair back?
I doubt it...
I see the value of Facebook (though I don't personally get a whole lot out of it), but at times I greatly sympathize with the author's broader point that brilliant minds are being put to use doing things I find empty.
I'm very into graphic design, and interaction design, but the fact that it all goes to selling soap and deodorant and candy makes it feel like such an empty pursuit for me. How many of the people coming with these things could instead be putting their talents toward more artistic or meaningful ends?
Of course, ultimately I'm a capitalist, and marketing does provide a valuable service to a capitalist society, and there are myriad reasons the people doing this kind of work should be doing it. Sometimes, I take a step back though, and can't help but wonder if there's a better way. Ultimately, if I want to change things, it is incumbent on me to provide an alternative, and I just don't have one.
If it makes you feel any better, any truly brilliant people working at facebook will probably make enough money in the IPO to be able to retire and work on whatever brilliant stuff they might feel like. At least for a while.
This is completely naive... today Italy is voting for a referendum. After 35 years we are near to reach the quorum, and beat Berlusconi special protection laws, avoid water privatization, and so forth.
Part of this I bet is thanks to Facebook, as in the latest days there was a massive campaign to go voting, ran collectively by all the people that think this vote is important, on Facebook. For us "internet geeks" Facebook may be not so cool, but the reality is that he is making the average person, a "connected person".
This is huge... and deserves the best minds in the world.
While I don't buy the "facebook is just games and noise" stuff, I do think we should be focusing a bit more in things like clean tech, space missions, etc.
Why does almost everybody want to go work for facebook instead of tesla or any other innovative company not primarily focused in "web" development?
And yeah, the big equity bucks, but I think those could be moving towards other tech fields too...
Facebook's number of active users served per employee is very impressive. The ridiculous number of photos uploaded every second.
I've long ago figured out that I'd never be able to pass the screens for Facebook, Apple (and at one time, Microsoft). I do still dream of Apple, even after reading the $0.99 Fortune Kindle single on how 'it's not about getting hired at Apple, it's about being able to stay'
What makes me happy however is creating apps that people use (and sometimes even enjoy using).
I very much have to agree. Perhaps I'm unsociable, perhaps it's because my interests long since diverged from those of most of my now-ex fellow students, but I really couldn't give a flying monkeys about most of their inane ramblings.
To use a sentence which at times gets posted all over Twitter: Facebook is where you meet old friends you don't really care about, Twitter is where you meet new friends. Fact is, it's true.
The one point I definitely do disagree with is that the focus on startups which aren't really that much about pushing humanity forward is so bad. Look at SpaceX - admittedly it came out of something which definitely did have intrinsic value, but 10 years down the line there might be an ex-Facebook biotech.
If you want a specialized device like a digital camera, then Facebook is not the place to look for advice from high school buddies, but for advice on what phone to buy, it could be. I asked my FB friends for advice on that very topic, and it was very helpful - and knowing the people giving the advice helped greatly because I was able to decide whose opinions to give weight to, and they knew my circumstances - they advised me on which phones are robust enough to withstand a toddler at home without me explicitly asking about that.
Friend groups and the newsfeed do a good job of controlling awkward oversharing - I see updates mostly from people who I care about, and this seems to be constantly improving. This has added immensely to the value of Facebook for me, and a time saver. The effort Facebook puts into this is very valuable and certainly not a waste of resources.
I think they were useful in egypt and tunisia to get people organized for the revolution that is still sweeping the middle east.
The idea that Facebook employs all the smart people is silly, there are far more smart programmers in the world than you can imagine, they are not all at Facebook.
There was another post similar to this a few days back. While this focuses specifically on Facebook (for seemingly hoarding intelligent people), the real issue is that there are little to no philanthropic movements in the tech industry. Reiterating my remarks from the aforementioned post, this is merely a result of "people" being bored and caring too much about themselves. For whatever reason, consumers have yet to be enlightened that there are others on the planet who may not be able to play farmville all day, let alone eat. This behavior is understandable, though, because we've developed pretty much everything with a narcissistic angle. Share your photos, talk to your friends, it's all about you, you, you. Until we abandon or differentiate between this attitude and a more caring/understanding one, then the intelligent folk are going to flock where the money is: narcissism.
> Facebook doesn’t provide me with anything useful.
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This guy sounds like a very cliche anti-social geek. What does he do outside of work? What gallery openings? What gigs? What social walks? I'm guessing that if you're not sociable, then a social orientated website is of no value.
It could be said that there's a lot of rubbish out there on facebook, and sites like meetup.com, last.fm, eventful, flickr are much better, but they don't have anything that ties them all together like facebook actually does.
The solution is not to stick your head in the sand, and ignore human interactions. You can't convieniently go 'humans, do this. I don't like it. I'm going to ignore them all'
Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing what the Diaspora approach evolves into: https://joindiaspora.com
Well, better connecting people's mundane lives than figuring out how to 'financial engineer' something I guess.
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that other people don't have utility in facebook.
It's interesting to see that most comments here focus on justifying Facebook's importance, rather than questioning the other half of the argument: are FB's employees really that brilliant?
It just seems that what they're doing is not that hard, compared to what people do in other engineering disciplines.
True...but on the other hand FB is now the Internet for many people. What is more FB is just a begging of the communication revolution. It is so funny how many companies are now trying to get rid of the main role of email in business - to name just a few Chatter, Yammer, Discourse...
There are almost 7 billion people on the planet. What is really sad is that most will never have the opportunity to contribute in any meaningful way. In reality we should be lamenting that we don't have 100 million more "brilliant" people working on the "important" problems.
The site seems down for me, so here's a mirror (courtesy of the Coral Content Distribution Network).
http://hueniverse.com.nyud.net/2010/11/all-these-brilliant-p...
The link is down for me. Ironic given that lots of the brilliant people at Facebook are working on ways to make websites stay up under heavy load.
Facebook actually provides useful services. It provides many many pointless services as well, but it does have some redeeming value, particularly for staying in touch with people overseas.
What would be much worse is if all these talented engineers were working for a large advertising company with a poor human rights record and no respect for your privacy. Now there's a nightmare scenario.
I'm not the biggest fan of the present vision for facebook, but these brilliant people are enabling others through their open source contributions http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/ to make things we find meaningful
If you ask yourself "What's most important in my life?" the answer will probably be "the people and relationships in my life".
Can't think of any better thing to work on than ways to improve our relationships with the people in our lifes. I'm happy that the best talent dealing with it. I wish I did.
" When it comes to content, I much rather rely on the editorial board of the New York Times for my news, than what my “friends” find interesting. "
Relying on strangers for information while deriding one's peers as a source of information doesn't strike me as a wise course of action.
quote :"There are many reasons why engineers want to work for Facebook, from the potential windfall to learning just how they are able to ship so much technology so fast. It is an engineering dreamland."
What kinda innovations and technology is facebook shipping out so fast? To me, facebook is a streamlined and polished way to keep in touch with people and share information, which the internet already offered and was made for. Whats more to it than that?
Google, IBM, Intel, Research and development, etc would be some of the places which I would be interested in working, as I see them as innovators. Facebook, twitter etc are just "apps" for me
Totally agree. The only problem about indicating 500 mil people could be wrong is that your voice gets drowned in the noise. Just wait it out and then send a post..."I told you so".
Some days ago a friend asked me if I could work on Apple, Microsoft or Google, which one I would choose and I stopped for a while thinking. Then he said "oh and Facebook" and my answer got out in a microsecond. It's pretty much the only company in the world where you work with people (as a whole, their life) and not with a user or a buyer.
A whining anti-FB rant from a single POV gets 250 upvotes? There was no value in this link.
What are "useful" jobs?
I take it the post refers specifically to the bright engineers who work at Facebook. I think he's right. Take Bret Taylor for example. This guy made Google Maps while at google, a tool that seriously changed a business. While at facebook do you know what he did? He converted their APIs to the (unfinished) oauth standard and in the process also deprecated a ton of features that were available to developers. They also released 4 widgets. ZERO innovation there , in fact the platform was more feature-rich 2 years ago. Taking a look at the documentation reveals how crippled and unfocused it is at this time.
On the other hand, there's twitter. Now that's a company that could use a few good engineers to stop the embarrassing downtimes.
Random prediction: ten years from now, a student in China will connect with a student in Germany over Facebook (or whatever mass-appeal social site rises to power). A friendship will grow into a partnership, yielding some of the greatest advances in energy technology of the century.
It is sad that bright people end up working for many rather worthless companies, producing so many worthless products and services.