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Comment by BarkMore | Hacker News Reader

It's rewarding when your work is used by 500 million people.

Yeah... but does any of that work benefit man-kind at all? More than 500 million people also use a toilet every day. So what? 500 million people and the most interesting thing on it is a "virtual farm". That's just plain ridiculous.

Facebook lets my disabled mother stay in touch with the members of her extended family, who otherwise would only be available at get togethers that she is not always well enough to travel to. It is the most important non medical technology in her life after the Wii. (Her doctors want to give Nintendo a medal, because that is amazing for rehabilitation.)

Bad example. Without toilets our cities would be disease ridden, awful places. You're obviously trolling, but I just thought I'd point that out. :)

Blue Man Group put it best:

> Right now, there is a virtually invisible network which links together millions of people who would otherwise be completely isolated from each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections that is so large and difficult to track that it would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone, in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways all of our lives are intertwined. This system is: modern plumbing.

His example is a bit trollish but his point is valid. The amount of people who use something doesn't make it valuable. The only reason I would take a job at Facebook would be because it's pre-IPO and because you'd get to tackle some pretty unique technical issues (scaling/social graph).

The commonsense oracle agrees:

http://commonsenseoracle.com/2010/10/the-value-of-facebook-i...

How do you define value then? Is something only really valuable if it, say, saves lives?

Ask Facebook users how many of them would be fine with paying a dollar every month to use it if its easy to make the payment. You will get a good idea of its value.

In the latest issue of Forbes Bill Gates said that he believes the toilet industry could be the next big boom, right now all of NA uses an old system with many design flaws.

That's all.

True about the Gates comment, which I didn't think at the time.

I wasn't trolling. I think the value of social lies with "peer production" which is a more evolved form of crowd-sourcing. Try and imagine a more sophisticated and brilliant Wikipedia.

Jeff Bezos is one of the funders of Kleiner Perkins new "sFund". I liked his comment at the announcement about using social to solve real problems like genetic engineering and climate change.

the dude who made the toilet would be like shit yeah i made the toilet.

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