Facebook: A Great Start to 2009 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook: A Great Start to 2009

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3 pointsashishk5 comments

I enjoyed Marco Arment's response: http://tumblelog.marco.org/68936456

except that these are 30-day active users; 1 in 4 is not a spammer, and the fact that the distribution is skewed only makes facebook's stat more amazing.

and someone who runs a "short blogging service" in today's world shouldn't be complaining about making things of "lasting value".

Spoken like somebody who doesn't use Tumblr. Making multi-content posts east is not the same as "short blogging." I mean, you can't make a short blogging criticism considering Twitter's out there, but Tumblr's system isn't short posting. Marco's a co-founder and he writes long posts frequently. Rather, it's a method of streamlining: if I want to discuss something I can. Tumblr used to call itself a scrapbook, and that's as good a description of it as any.

Would you consider tweets to be creations of lasting value? I think I could argue quite convincingly that Facebook's network, the connections it inspires and facilitates, and the social interaction it makes possible is of far more lasting value to the world and its people than any tweeting or blogging, especially when they're as devoid of content as the posts I've seen.

Making snide clever comments is easy, building something that is actually making a difference isn't.

I actually made the same comment in response to Marco: Facebook is not valueless. Neither is Tumblr, though. I don't know if it's "making a difference" in the sense of, say, social change, but it's providing the best product of its kind in the market. That has value to me.

I don't use Twitter. I think it's stupid. But creating a vast opt-in, entirely-indexed community is something of value. The fact that companies can search to find real-time who's talking about them is big and will be leveraged more in the future, and the fact that its APIs let Tweets be used for nearly anything is big too. So it has value, even if it's value I will never need myself.

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