Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

This only confirms my conviction that solipsism syndrome should be studied more closely in relation to the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome

Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.

The most charitable reading I can give it still has it missing the point and not understanding what it is that's being built up with all these companies.

Facebook, as I've said, restores and maintains social connections. This is absolutely not a minor thing, it's life-altering. Perhaps it's too early on in the process to understand that, but 10 or 20 years from now, everyone will get it when they look at who has been around and what they've shared as experiences.

Twitter is the global hive-mind. It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about, or at least it or its successor will when extends its reach that far. Yes, most of that is shallow, because most of what most of us think about is shallow. Duh. That's sort of by definition if you think that through for five minutes. If we were all deeper, then the norm would be redefined and we'd all seem shallow again. Twitter succeeds at capturing the hive-mind specifically because it is so short. Your immediate thoughts are immediate, they're bite sized. The format matches the format of your thinking. There's value in knowing what people are thinking, though of course that value will be applied in different ways.

Foursquare is a few things. One, it's designed as a universal customer loyalty system on its primary level. I suppose if you think commerce is of necessity shallow, you can dismiss this as meaningless. Of course, it does give the small niche businesses a tool to level the playing field, but even that's probably not enough for some. But what about this- it's also restoring a sense of place to urban and suburban environments. There's a trackable history of who was where and when. It's not as disjointed as it was, there's a throughline. "Oh", you might say, "Bob goes to the same coffee shop I do, but three hours later". Now you're closer to Bob, and the coffee shop has more history for you.

Yeah, ok, none of this is curing cancer, but it does matter, it does make a difference, and it does improve people's lives.

You can tell me it's meaningless, but you're wrong.

I think this also has to do with more people underestimating the trend you refer to than overestimating it. I think what this means is that because of the pace of technology, we have things that go from an idea in someone's head into an ecosystem of businesses, applications and technologies in just a few years. The ability to rapidly develop and share what we've built lets people fill in the gaps from deep meaningful, concepts like "never lose track of your friends" all the way to "Mary gained 20 points on farmville today" so quickly that it's hard not to mix them up as being one in the same.

I'd argue that this is similar to the car going from "new sector of transportation, economy, and way of life" all the way to "now with rust-proof undercoating with 0 down, 0% APR and $1000 Cash back", just much more quickly. If you were to look at the automobile industry after the arrival of the used car salesman as a solved problem due to the abundance of its superficialities, you'd miss the opportunity to build the hybrid car, the Smart car, the electric car, the hydrogen car and more, and all of the smaller incremental yet meaningful advances in car safety and technology over the years. In the larger scheme of things, Facebook is probably the model T of social networks...

The premise of the article is that because there are so many fluff start-ups, there are so few non-fluff start-ups.

Now, for the sake of debate, let's agree there are lots of fluff start-ups. But does that mean there are fewer non-fluff start-ups? I don't think so. It's a false dichotomy. Just because you have more Zynga-like companies does not mean you don't have more start-ups today than a decade ago going after cancer.

This is the most common flaw I find in arguments related to this.

Similar thoughts come to me from time to time, mostly when I realize I spend 50-60 hours a week making advertising more efficient. Still... there are upsides. I left a career as a scientific programmer creating medical research software because selling out offered me a 90% raise. That's not an exaggeration. And a chance to work for companies that offer enough equity that it might change my life, even if it's just a hefty downpayment. And the chance to work in my choice of cities on America's coasts.