From a great piece by Dave Karpf on the problem with Facebook:
“The trouble with Facebook is, more broadly, the trouble with the entirety of Silicon Valley and its particular version of techno-capitalism. You could imagine a profitable company that does what Facebook is actually good for. Create a free social network with a newsfeed optimized for personal life updates and conversations within your extended social graph. Pare things back, revert it to the place where people keep in touch and organize dinner parties. Sell advertisements against the page views. There’s money in such a company.
But it’s not a trillion-dollar company. Its founder doesn’t buy a mansion and then buy all the houses on adjacent lots to ensure privacy. Its early investors don’t carve out entire career paths on the basis of having been an early-investor-in-Facebook. It’s ultimately a small-money company. And Silicon Valley doesn’t do small-money companies.”
