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All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

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Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#11

Post by dschobel »

dekayed wrote: post #8

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.”

The ads are a means to an end.

More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome".

It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#12

Post by JasonMoyMN79 »

It's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people.

Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#13

Post by nir »

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.)

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#14

Post by wslh »

dschobel wrote: post #11
dekayed wrote: post #8

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.”

The ads are a means to an end. More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome". It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

Sorry for my Naivete, but I think that the world priorities must be peace, health and poverty.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#16

Post by JasonMoyMN79 »

btipling wrote: post #7

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 happen…

It's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people. Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#17

Post by wallflower »

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).

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#18

Post by bbgm »

dschobel wrote: post #11
dekayed wrote: post #8

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.”

The ads are a means to an end. More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome". It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

I had asked a related question on Quora some months ago. There is a need in many scientific fields, especially life sciences, for experts in scalable infrastructure, statistical learning, visualization, graph analysis, and good software engineering, but since hard science doesn't pay well enough, the majority of these people are going to the Facebook's of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but we have some challenges in figuring out what "value" means, how we measure it, and perhaps most importantly, how we reward it.

There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#20

Post by scrollbar »

dschobel wrote: post #11
dekayed wrote: post #8

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.”

The ads are a means to an end. More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome". It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

I don't know, I think you have it the other way around. Content and apps are a means for generating ad revenue- the advertiser is the customer.

Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google.

OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.

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