My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

Why are you talking about curing cancer or solving poverty? All he said was,

"Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole."

This isn't a first-world versus big-problem dichotomy; this is just a matter of whether or not what you're working on is measurably benefiting anyone. If not, then yes, it might be a waste of talent.

These justifications are silly, anyway. How many people, in offices all over the world, are spending significant amounts of time doing something other than work? I don't mean taking the occasional ten-minute break, I mean spending half or more of their day on Facebook or other distractions. How much GDP worldwide is being consumed by this? How much human effort is being spent just clicking on something while staring at a screen?

How much more effort do we want to put into trying to maximize all that waste?

coding reference, wikipedia, blog writing, foursquare, skype, one hour HN every day... that's hardly what we can call an Internet diet.

What about taking some holidays with no Internet at all? Like 2 or 3 weeks hiking in some remote area - it takes a few days to stop thinking about checking emails, twitter, HN etc.

Bring a notebook and take notes about your ideas. Hiking works wonders for that, you'll get tons of ideas in a day hike.

I'm not sure that the Internet is the problem here. Often you discover "grand ideas" by seemingly stumble upon them or by being active in a specific problem domain. Going on an Internet diet might not help. Unless, of course, you replace all that freed-up with other activities to fuel your creativity. So if you're looking for BigHuge Social problems to solve, why not getting involved with and picking the brains of organizations that encounter these on a daily basis, organizations such as Amnesty, Greenpeace, The Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. Together they probably experience every significant social, economic, political and environmental problem there is.

But then again, I'm not sure that the author's approach to grand ideas is that fruitful:

Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole.

This is a dangerous fallacy as it can lead you towards a path of entrepreneurial apathy and cynicism. There's nothing wrong in positioning yourself so that you at least are solving everyday problems for people and companies. Ideally you're making a small yet valuable contribution to the improvement of lives and organizations.

I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and thus bring down our GDP". Come on guys, they found it fun to take up the challenges of making such a thing. Why should we look down upon them because they are not solving a "real" problem. To recite acangiano's example, technologies like memcached came from livejournal which was considered the biggest mode of pass time in pop culture. And even if zynga is not open sourcing something like that, so what? They are working on something they find is fun (and can make them shitloads of money) I do not think its upto us to judge their intentions (more over even if we did that, they would just sit on their pile of money and say FU).

By that logic all the game companies and social sites just shut down. (okey this is a major exaggeration of what you said, but added that because I find that a little funny.)

Edit: spellings

I wouldn't suggest an internet diet to anyone over 15 years of age. Brains feed on information and the information on the internet is vastly more interesting than what most people encounter in an everyday "offline" life. Seems like the problem is the distractions caused by social sites. It's easy to turn that habit off, you are not missing much anyway. If you feel you are feeding too much on web fragments, read some books on a kindle for a break.