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Comment by alexvr | Hacker News Reader

I almost had to stop reading after this sentence:

"The U.S. has the world’s most sophisticated system of financing radical ideas, and the results have been impressive, from Google to Facebook to Twitter."

Not one of these began as a "radical" idea. I have a ton of respect for Google, as it certainly does some radical things today, but it started out as just a better search engine. And Facebook is hardly even an idea. Don't even get me started on Twitter. They certainly provide lots of value, but the initial concepts are not radical whatsoever.

Concepts/companies like solar roadways, Tesla, and SpaceX blow Facebook, Twitter, and even Google out of the water in terms of radicalness.

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Yes, that sentence got me as well.

It's not that Twitter and Facebook aren't important (they aren't to me but that's irrelevant), it's that there are other arguably more important and very importantly (in this context), different, innovations from the US.

When a person is saying "radical ideas...from...idea1, idea2, etc." one expects a continuum or line of DIFFERENT ideas. Not two ideas that are pretty similar and three in the same industry. The "From" scale is way too short for the article's concept. It's like saying "Radical clothing designs from jeans with no pockets to jeans with stonewashed fading and jeans which are dyed green".

End nitpick.

At least "solar roadways" has a clear purpose/need. Twitter and Facebook were/are almost completely frivolous, and only because of success have they become part of the business fabric in the US and around the world. The idea what these two services succeeded and are so "valuable" is indeed pretty radical.

Your profile lists an icq #, an email address, and a twitter handle....

You don't think there's value to networking social connections together online for ease of communication and media sharing? How else would all the things these networks do, be performed in an efficient manner?

There's no value to KiK, WhatsApp, instant messaging, email etc? Because all Facebook is primarily, is a communication platform, whether you're sharing text or images or video.

I think you've got it dramatically wrong. These things are worth a trillion dollars, and the value has been proven true across every culture on earth.

That's kind of my point, these things which are seemingly frivolous at first have actually evolved into "trillion" dollar entities that we all rely on. That's pretty fucking radical. Did we all need Instagram or Snapchat a decade ago? No, but now because we all wanted these services, they have a foothold in both our personal and business worlds.

My point was only that while these social networks seem obvious, and boring, they are in fact pretty radical.

Even if Facebook and Twitter are a waste of time (you could probably convince me of this, in fact), saying how the US does them well is called "damning with faint praise."

The US invents other things besides Twitter and Facebook.

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