From the article Lars says that facebook has changed the world. I don't see this being the case. So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing? Aside from keeping an enormous number people 'busy' for hours a day that might otherwise have been spent studying, working or actually doing things? I am skeptical about facebook's benefit to the world as anything more that entertainment du jour. Maybe Lars was just interested in giving wave another try under the facebook brand instead. It certainly might make more sense in a social connectivity company. I'm not arguing that facebook isn't very popular, just with point that it's world changing. Regardless, I wish him all the best in his new job.
I'm "friends" with people on facebook that would have (or already had) slipped out of my life otherwise. This summer I spent the weekend at my college roommate's house. I hadn't talked to him in nearly 10 years and without facebook I likely never would have again. That seems like a big deal.
I don't want to make assumptions about your specific use of Facebook, but how many possible connections have "you" (a typical FB user) missed because of time spent on Facebook instead of doing other stuff?
I won't deny that Facebook can make certain connections easier - of course it can, that's what it's designed to do. But how large is the net positive effect?
Think about the difference search engines can make to finding information. Without the web and search engines, how can you find information on a topic? You have to go to a local library - hit or miss on what information you'll find, especially for something obscure, or find some magazines or a book on the topic, or maybe find an expert who's willing to explain it to you.
Think of the difference social networks can make for keeping in touch with people. Without social networks, you have to remember to send them an email to see what's up, maybe pick up the phone now and then and give someone a call, meet up at a pub now and then, send a card for Christmas.
Now, to me both are incredibly convenient services, but by FAR only one can be described as world-changing.
"but how many possible connections have "you" (a typical FB user) missed because of time spent on Facebook instead of doing other stuff?"
Uh, "zero"? Maybe some people compulsively stare at Facebook for hours at a time and decide against going out tonight to click "refresh" instead, and I suppose there's always a marginal effect, but most people just stuff Facebook in their downtime or other extra time, from what I can see. Obsessives will obsess anyhow so even that's probably not a problem.
And then of course you stack this up against the real connections renewed that would have expired and your argument is just not credible.
In fact, Facebook if anything encourages you to go out tonight, or to do something interesting with your life rather than just sitting on Facebook, because you see your friends going out and doing interesting things and then posting pictures or talking about it on Facebook. (Assuming, of course, that you have interesting friends.)
I ask because I honestly don't know. I have friends who fall under both usage scenarios, but these are just anecdotes and/or extremes. I haven't seen any actual data on the effects of Facebook, either positive or negative.
You're conflating search engines with all human knowledge contained on the Internet, even though there are many search engines and many alternate ways of finding information on the Internet (not to mention how much of the best information isn't on the Internet).
Then from the other side you equate a social network to a phone call or email, completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network. Or how common it is on Facebook to find people you may never have seen again otherwise. Or the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.
And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly value any of that. I log into Facebook maybe twice a month, and I don't particularly admire their mission. However when it comes to your closing statement, I'm in agreement, except with the inverse proposition.
>You're conflating search engines with all human knowledge contained on the Internet, even though there are many search engines and many alternate ways of finding information on the Internet (not to mention how much of the best information isn't on the Internet).
I am, because all the information on the Internet is useless if you can't find it.
>completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network.
Everyone in the world IS a single social network, barring several small isolated tribes here and there. The phone network is a single social network. Email is a single social network. Facebook formalizes and makes access to this network easier, but to a lesser extent than Google makes access to the world's information easier.
>the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.
That is a fair point, and I'm certainly not denying that Facebook is useful, but I stand by my assertion. If you could somehow quantify and compare the difference made to society by search engines vs. social networks, search engines have a far larger impact.
Let me put it another way: Google is to the printing press as Facebook is to ???
Yes, Google is nothing without the rest of the Internet, but so is Facebook, so I'm content to run with that comparison even if it's not perfect.
I hadn't talked to him in nearly 10 years and without facebook I likely never would have again.
What does this tell you about the real strength of this friendship? I don't mean to pick on you; I hear this argument a lot and I don't understand it. A really good friendship would have found a way to stay alive over 10 years with or without Facebook.
They probably moved to different cities, and your argument could be made for any of the technologies that held friends together before Facebook. If they were really friends they would have stayed friends without the crutch of the telephone, letters, smoke signals or other communication technologies. Are pen pals not really friends because they use a certain messaging technology to stay together?
"A really good friendship would have found a way to stay alive over 10 years with or without Facebook."
That's true, and I certainly have friends that I intend to stay in touch with for many years to come, Facebook or no. Relationships fall into concentric circles though; there's acquaintances on the outside that only care about slightly, and there's lifelong friends near the centre. Somewhere in between are people that you would certainly talk to if you ever ran into them at random, but wouldn't make much of an effort to stay in touch otherwise.
Facebook is ideal for these kind of relationships, because the semi-public nature of wall posts keeps things casual (letters and emails feel very intimate, and it can be strange sending a long "hey, what's up?" message to someone you don't know that well). There's also the fact that you can see their recent activities and photographs, giving you an easy conversational opener ("I saw you visited x/did y/know z, how was it?"). I think it was quite carefully designed to afford such interaction styles.
Setting aside your personal judgments on how other people spend their time, do you actually not think that facebook has had a large impact on how (primarily younger) people socialize, understand each other, and think about their relationships?
I don't think so, I'm 20, and I remember when I was 12 or so I had friends that spent hours talking with each other on the phone at night, now I'm pretty sure they spend it on Facebook chatting. I'm not convinced there's been any fundamental change, just shifting some deck chairs.
So then why isn't Facebook as notable as laying the first landlines across the US? Sure it's not the first time people have been communicating in this way, but by your argument Facebook is implementing the way that the current generation communicates with each other. Now there certainly are nuances to the situation; there are parts about communicating through Facebook that are richer [1] and also scarier [2] than the telephone. But if your claim is that Facebook has taken place of the telephone for certain types of communication, I fail to see how that isn't changing the world.
[1] Sending various forms of media to each other, having a historical record of communication, etc.
[2] Privacy controls, control over your data, etc.
When I was 20 (in 1995), social networking was done through telnet...sitting in the computer lab until the sun come up chatting away with strangers at other universities. I still keep in contact with a few of the people I met that way, but not through Facebook. I still don't even have an account!
I was just gonna say... back in myyy day, when I was 12, in 1990, we socialized by dialing into BBSes and spamming Usenet via asynchronous relay. Clearly the GP runs in social circles heavily involved in some sort of ancient technology cult; "tele-phone"?
The real difference is that they aren't going to keep the same phones numbers forever. With FB, and whatever eventually replaces it, they have a shot at keeping in touch all their lives.
As a primarily younger person (18), it hasn't changed anything. It hasn't made me "hang out" with anyone I don't hang out with regularly ect.
I mean, I recently left my home town to go to a new school and when I wanted to say good bye to my friends who I don't normally talk to- I wrote on their walls, but I also called them-
So you were 12 when Facebook was started and had Facebook your entire high school life? It seems a bit hard to be subjective then since you haven't known any different.
That's a valid point; nevertheless, I have plenty of (some very close) friends that do not have Facebook- or recently acquired it so that they may see photos of themselves, so I can easily speak about their lives, but I do not know if that counts (does it?) because they grew up around people who have facebooks.
But in the end, you are right, I'm not quite subjective because of the way I grew up.
Have you ever seen people/group of friends in the bar or at other social occasion, taking out their phones and start fiddling with Facebook for hours? I've seen many. On the upside, i think it does help people connecting with their friends. As much as it does, it's a site where you see your friends' photos, that's about it!
I communicate with my high-school friends more often than the days of ICQ, MSN, and Friendster joined together.
Keep in mind that me and my friends have passed university and are working and have our own life. Oh, by the way, we live in different continents of the world.
So very true . I live in the US, and my close friends are distributed around the world. My parents live in Africa, my brother is currently in Europe, cousins in Israel, UK, etc, and former colleagues around the world as well. We all manage to stay in touch. Facebook wasn't the first service that allowed everyone to do that, but it's certainly done a better job of getting everyone on. Has it changed the world? Not at the level at which Google did, but it's certainly made it a lot easier to keep in touch with a broad group of people.
My girlfriend had lost contact with her mother for over 6 years and recently found each other on Facebook. They reunited a couple of weeks ago and have been communicating ever since. They are both so happy.
I have not been in touch with my dad in the Philippines for almost 20 years. We lost contact when my mom, brother and I moved and we didn't have telephones back then.
Last year, my half-sister found my brother and me on Facebook.
It was good to learn to that my dad is still alive and got to talk to him after all these years.
Why hadn't she been in touch before? I find it slightly far-fetched that she had actually tried to get in touch before, and the only way she managed was through facebook.
Maybe just the fact that it makes it so easy for people to look up other people. All you need is there name, and know what they look like. Pretty hard to do that anywhere else.
Seriously? Your GF needed Facebook to reunite with her mother? As stereotypical as I may sound, but she needs to get her life back and socialize beyond Facebook. It's simply absurd.
Well, if you have been completely out of someones life for long enough, calling them or meeting them at first could be awkward enough to discourage either person to put the effort into setting it up.
With Facebook you open up a very non committal link into each others lives, where you may send each other the odd message, comment on what each other is doing, without getting right back into things straight away.
That's definitely world changing... regaining touch with one's near and dear....
The specifics of your girlfriend's case apart....Losing touch with one's own mother.. for 6 years??@!#@!#, and Facebook re-uniting them??
Unless this was a forcible separation due to a natural calamity/war... (in which case my heart-felt sympathies) anything like this is really inexcusable.
I really,really find that sad if the current, or future generation would be requiring Facebook/Twitter to keep in touch with one's parents. That trivializes relationships.
"So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing"
Basically, you just implied what Facebook has done - redefine how we build and maintain relationships. That's a huge social impact.
Now that every single damn website has "Login with Facebook Account" button, I think it's a big deal.
Now that every phone comes out with "syncing with Facebook" feature, I think it's a big deal.
Now that people actually put their credit card info and buy stuffs on Facebook (although it's small right now), I think it's a big deal.
Now that there is a single entity that keeps track of our life/relationship history, I think it's a big deal.
I mean... these are probably not a big deal for you, but many people in the tech industry think so. That is why the valuation of Facebook is so high. It has a lot of potential. It's not all about just.. attracting people to increase traffic and spamming them with ads. It's more about how the social aspect of everyone's lives have been redefined. There was letters, then phone, then emails, then now.. facebook/twitter/etc.
Plus, Lars cannot give Wave "another try" at Facebook. Google Wave is a Google's property and anything related to Wave technology will make a good reason for Google to sue Facebook -- just to worsen the relationship of the two companies. Facebook probably wanted the leader who excels are putting out great products. That's what Lars is great at.
When you look at it zoomed out, Facebook combined disparate web avenues (chat, contacts, forums, game portals, bboards, adspace) into one place and added a thick air of mass adoption. This is hardly world-changing innovation-wise but it is game-changing in making the web more usable and understandable. Facebook is a fork of the whole web (Open web vs Facebook Web). I am betting the farm that this is what internally facebook is running with. This is a powerful motivator because they can justify to themselves and to everyone in the company the act of copying>improving elements of the open web into it. This is why a Facebook email, search, OS is inevitable.
In short - my definition of Facebook. its the web in the CONTEXT of your social circle and that has changed the web biz game, it has only begun to change the world 'proper' and thats what i think excites people like Lars.
I can't help but draw some parallel to AOL/CompuServe/etc. Like Facebook, they were attempts to make the web both more accessible to the average person as well as present in very clear terms what they could do on this new "Information Superhighway".
A lot of technical people look at the collection of services that Facebook is offering and can easily enumerate instances of prior art and thus I imagine feel somewhat dismissive of Facebook.
"Farmville? Why not just go to any of the number of flash game portals that have existed since the early 2000s?", "Messageboards? Older than dirt".
Technical people tend to forget that the average person doesn't like searching, and needs to be told what they "should be doing" (topically, that was probably part of the problem with Wave's lack of adoption - too much freedom, too different - people need to be guided). People prefer having "everything in one place" with explicit parallels (rather than absolute freedom) to what is important to them.
I would hazard to guess that to the average person, Facebook is the web. That part is kind of game changing (and arguably, not necessarily in a good way).
I think facebook seems to be doing more to embed themselves in the "open web" (connect, instant personalization) than they are bringing elements of the open web into facebook.
Yeah I would have said the same thing before Facebook had 500m users and before people spent more time on FB than on any other place on the internet.
Something is going on here, and IMO what is happening is most difficult to understand for bleeding edge techies like the people on this forum.
Actually - The Social Network may be mostly fiction but it does capture an idea about facebook that I never realized before - the idea that it's important who you know. Which is the essence of places like Harvard. And the essence of Facebook. Like many others I thought facebook was just a slightly less annoying version of MySpace or friendster, but, as it turns out, it's not, and you have got to give credit to Mark Zuckerberg to understand this from the very start.
Apart from all that, facebook is now the new Google in terms of desirability to work there. No wonder, as it's pre-IPO so you stand to make very good money once they do their IPO. Especially as an exec. You can be a me-too rich person like the Googleionnaires who didn't do anything special except get hired by Google before the IPO. I get the appeal.
This may be the case, although, I'd argue that Facebook really doesn't do anything that makes it any easier for you to connect with your friends and family than email does. However, let's say it does, that still doesn't mean Facebook is world changing, it just means its a better mousetrap.
And email doesn't make it any easier to connect with friends and family than paper based mail does. Oh wait.. it does...
Facebook has a number of features for communication that email doesn't have:
1) Passive communication: the fact you can go and check someone's profile and see what they have been up to is very powerful
2) Default public communication. By making communication public by default it lets your other friends and family benefit from any communication you do with a 3rd party
3) No email addresses - people change email addresses a lot more than they should. The only comparable problem on Facebook is when women get married and change their lastname, but I've never seen any problems arising from this.
That really just scratches the surface of the differences.
Sometimes, doing something better really is enough to make a huge difference.
Yes, but Facebook is fungible. In the same way that MySpace and Orkut were. The only thing that's holding people on your website is other people and a bunch of dumb games. You can say whatever you want about Google, but there is not a single search engine today that is as good in all cases. That's why I'll bet my money that 10 years from now Google will be well and going strong, whereas I have no idea what will happen to Facebook.
- It helps me connect better with people I already known for long (There are a lot of people I'd have been out of touch with if not for Facebook)
- It helps me also maintain a network of 'loose connections'. These are people I don't know very well, but can now easily keep in touch with. I would otherwise have never written or phoned them.
- I get a lot of relevant content from Facebook - this includes links to articles/blogs that are relevant to me,videos that I find to be fun/useful/inspiring.
- I have had some of the most interesting debates on people's Facebook walls. Some very long ones. At times, we've decided to then take the debate offline, and have actually followed that up with a debate when we meet.
facebook for me is content discovery + keeping in touch + updating + discussing. Thats a lot, and quite simply, it is not very far from being at the center of a lot of my online activity.
You bring up good points, but you also aren't taking into account facebook's potential to change the world. What we're seeing develop is really a de anonymized private version of the Internet. They have their own substitute emailing system that in a lot of ways have eliminated spam.
You can search for pages, things, groups. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, if having this internet where you're forced to reveal your identity is a good or bad thing, but it definitely has the ability to change the world.
Facebook is the new AOL - but this time could work.
If you only message friends through facebook, only share photos and video in facebook and only read blogs in facebook - then what else on the net do you need?
Google can dominate the rest of the net, but if your net only means facebook then the chocolate factory just got made irrelevent.
Now imaging facebook does a deal with a phone maker to only connect to facebook, or to only have free data to facebook then Google's ad revenue goes down
Something I notice in common about many of these stories is how much people cite Zuckerberg in particular as a reason for joining/liking Facebook. I don't see anything like it for Larry or Sergey at Google.
My guess is that Zuckerberg has his own "Reality Distortion Field", albeit of a very different style than the original (Steven Jobs'), and this is a major factor in the recent migratory wave.
The incredible potential for growth in stock value can't hurt either . . .
Many folks inside and out think that FB still hasn't found its "adsense" - when and if they do even late comers to the party will live out their days like sultans.
I think you're absolutely right, and given the amounts they invest in customer acquisition for every new title plus the 30% Facebook Credits rake, that's all Facebook really needs.
After 6 years and after the stressful situation he describes with Google Wave, it is reasonable for anyone to make a clean break and try out something new
Among the things I find interesting - the guy was the co-founder of what is now Google Maps (after Google's acquisition). However, now, he has chosen to join Facebook instead of setting out on his own new venture.
Perhaps he could have a bigger impact if he founded a new company.
Perhaps he could have a bigger impact if he founded a new company.
If you have a brand new or revolutionary idea, that may be true. But if you have an idea that fits into what somebody else has done, then joining that company and using it as a lever to magnify the reach of your work might be more effective. Another way to look at it is that in a startup you usually have to worry about a lot of things that are not core to the idea, such as marketing and productization. If you have other people to do that for you (as I'm sure Facebook does) then you are more free to focus on implementing your ideas to the best of your ability.
Not at his level. He'll have all the tools and the manpower at his disposal to realize his dreams. It's not as though having worked at google or sold 'maps' is any guarantee for future projects to be either successful or funded. See 'Cuil'.
Well, Cuil is actually a counterexample to the "funded" part of your statement. They raised a crazy amount of money considering their lack of accomplishment.
I think Lars could get funding from just about any investor in the valley, if he wanted to start a new venture. But Norvig said it best (paraphrasing): "If you want to accomplish interesting things, go where the data is." Right now, FaceBook has one of the most interesting data sets on the planet, possibly rivaling Google's. If Lars wanted to replicate that, he needs to build a product that's useful enough to convince everybody to give him their data. That's non-trivial. It's easier just to join a company that already owns the data and then figure out interesting things to do with it.
Wouldn't it be possible to make a startup that wasn't based on covertly collecting little worker ants' personal information? I'd like to see something else for a change.
In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't do anything without data.
I suppose you could have something like the PC revolution, where the industry was still based around manipulating data, but the data lives on your personal property. But that ship has sailed: personal computers have been available for 35 years, so pretty much all applications that rely on one person's data being manipulated in isolation by themselves have already been discovered. The interesting work now is when you collect patterns of data among many users, and that requires that many users be willing to give you their data.
He's been there and done that. Presumably, between the acquisition of Google Earth and the fact that that acquisition was for pre-IPO Google stock, he's probably set for life financially. And he's already pretty well-known as the lead for Maps and Wave.
Personally, the major reason I'm still interested in startups is because I haven't yet succeeded at one. It's the challenge that's the thrill. There's a whole lot of bullshit that goes along with that, though, and if I already had a major success under my belt, I'd be more than happy to go work for the hot flavor-of-the-decade company where I can spend my time innovating and let someone else deal with the bullshit.
In many ways, with his level of recognition and technical success working at a company is far preferred. He likely gets to work what he wants to work on, gets paid well, and gets to focus 100% on technical issues.
If you do a startup, you spend a LOT of time thinking about managing and hiring people -- at least after the jump.
Startup are great places to potentially make a lot of money. After doing a few myself, including some pretty decent deals -- I don't think I'll do another unless I simply have some Google-like breakthough.
I'm always a little sad to see good talent go to Facebook, because I have no intention of using their products. I would rather see that talent working somewhere else.
I am guessing he means social networking sites in general. (if not then its only my opinion :) ). IMO facebook et al are not that "productive" as compared to google. Sure it does add value to your social life but compare it to the technologies created by google . which really have changed our lives .
The cynical side of me imagines all these people are joining FB for its inevitable blockbuster IPO. But then another part of me wonders if FB is coming out with something completely revolutionary. Something so amazing that all these smart folks cant wait to work on it.
I think FB is coming out with something revolutionary. However, neither they nor anybody else know what it is yet. It will only be apparent after it has been released. That's why people are joining FB; they all want to help discover the new revolutionary idea.
I think Wave needed more time in stealth, before the big announcement, beta client, invite-only service, etc. Wave should have gone to different companies (like Facebook) and made itself their new platform, such that, all at once, Google could flip a switch one day and you'd realize that all your activity on Facebook, MSN, Exchange, YouTube, etc, was all really going on in Wavelets all along.
Wave has no metaphor, it is complete non-sense to my mother. Neat idea, totally useless in reality. What worked (real-time collaboration) should be (has been?) ported to gmail and google docs, period.
I love Google products and I didn't shed any tears when they shut down wave...
Every new idea has to start somewhere. What is complete nonsense to your mother makes perfect sense to the next generation. Eventually somebody will re-invent Wave when the time is right, and then it will be the metaphor for future products.
I found it interesting to hear that the size of the company (2.5K employees) would feel very different to that of google (25K employees). Does this size difference simply mean that google has one extra layer of management (many centers) compared to facebook, or is there some other difference? The author speculates about the compensation, including stock options, but is there anything else?
I don't think there is much intrisincally different between Facebook and Google. That is, when Google had only 2.5K employees it was attracting people like Lars from other companies like MS and Yahoo, and for the same reasons. The problem is scale. It's much easier to find 2.5K smart people than it is to find 25K smart people, and so when you're at 25K the average intelligence of your population is much lower. I don't think it's so much the extra management than the reduced signal-to-noise ratio that Lars is referring to. If you've worked at companies of different sizes (I have) the difference is tangible.
I don't think the average intelligence at Google has declined very much. The people I work with are still all very, very smart - Lars said much the same thing in his article. There've been quite a few very intelligent latecomers recently - Alex Russell and Joshua Schacter both joined in 2009, even if Schacter did leave eventually. And I've heard a bunch of old-timer friends - people hired in 2005, or even in 2002 - say that there are recent, fairly inexperienced hires doing amazing things.
I think the problem is that the intelligence of a group is defined by the minimal intelligence of its members, not by the average. If you have even one member who just doesn't get it, then everyone else needs to dumb down their ambitions so that he doesn't get left behind. That's why the "no false positives" rule is so important in startup hiring, and why the public school system sucks so much. I think it's a fairly good bet that with 25k employees, the dumbest person at Google is dumber than the dumbest person in FaceBook. And with Google's shared infrastructure, it's fairly likely that you'll run across some design decision made by him.
I agree that the minimal intelligence is going to be lower, but I also don't think it matters as much as you think. Consider the extreme: say Google has 24,999 really smart people and one dumb person, do you really think that one person is going to have that much of an impact?
there are recent, fairly inexperienced hires doing amazing things
Maybe, but is that true of the average new hire? I'm sure Google is still hiring a fair number of smart people who will do amazing things; my argument is that the average has dropped. You can cite individual examples of smart people but those aren't a counter-argument unless you have a statistically significant number of them.
Remember, if you're going to use free food and candy stations as hiring tools, don't be surprised when the type of people you hire are more interested in eating free food and candy than building something awesome.
Scale may have something to do with it, but I don't think it's intelligence. People at Google are not sitting around complaining about the idiots they have to work with. That happens almost anywhere except Google, but Google has had pick of the litter for years now selecting heavily for intelligence.
As an early-stage startup guy and hired gun, my outside perspective is of course biased towards the smaller company, so take this with a grain of salt:
I think the main thing is that Facebook has a unified product and vision, with really strong UI, and a lot of hardcore infrastructure all centered around a global experience. Meanwhile Google has one strong business, and is repeatedly throwing spaghetti at the wall to find new areas to expand to. Sure there's a lot of great products there, but nothing with the potential Facebook has.
I might eat this words but nothing facebook offers to the masses has had the same impact google search and maps has. Google might have a terrible track record with sideproject but its core ventures still have immense potential.
Well I'm actually took the other side of this argument in a comment 4 hours ago, in what I thought was a pretty solid argument, however I'm getting reamed in voting, so maybe I'm wrong...
On the other hand, hackers (myself included) value raw utility highly and maybe on average we just prefer google search and google maps as tools due to the vapidity of Facebook. I certainly feel that way.
However, comparing the impact on the larger world, I really really think Facebook has made way more impact than we care to admit. They got the whole world on a single social network. They created the newsfeed, some thing which is ubiquitous across all sites now. The Facebook platform, though buggy and heinous was completely revolutionary when they launched it. They created a single sign on that is used by a staggering number of people across the web.
Personally, Facebook's innovation over MySpace is every bit as impressive as Google over Altavista or MapQuest. We may not value the ends, but 500,000,000 users with orders of magnitude more engagement than Google is undeniable impact.
Interesting question. I think it's possible to maintain and even improve the average level of intelligence of employees, but past a certain size it's so ridiculously difficult as to be infeasible, practically speaking. Also, I'm not convinced that it's in the company's best interests, but I guess that depends on what the goal of the company is. If, like most companies, it is to make money, then having too many smart people could be a liability; after a certain point you want to hire people for reliability and teamwork rather than individual intelligence. Even if the company has some other goal, I would say it's probably easier to try to keep the company small and automate as much work as possible than it is to keep hiring really smart people.
The problem is not even that with more people, you eventually have some "not so bright" employees.
When everyone is super smart, it's great but it's also a curse. It's hard to get anything done because there is always someone very smart to find one possible reason why it should be done differently. Think of it as the curse of perfection.
I witnessed this firsthand in a previous life. It's amazingly frustrating, because it's so counter-intuitive.
As someone else noted thoughtfully in this thread, Norvig once said "Go where the data is." [extreme paraphrase]
Google's data isn't largely proprietary. The web is accessible for any to crawl. Google Maps is based on essentially public data, or easily obtained data. A savvy and well funded enough competitor could enter these markets.
Facebook's data is proprietary and user-created. The users have built-in inertia for Facebook 'cause they sure as hell don't want to abandon the three years of content they've built on a whim.
Add to that Google's recent missteps like net neutrality, and their insane and technocratic hiring policies, and I don't think I know a single truly bright person who would want to go to Google right now.
Facebook, however, is looking pretty damn sexy... all that data that the users forked over... hmmm... Not to mention the fact that if you're a social person, Facebook is FUN.
Interesting point, but Google has much, much more of my data than Facebook has. FB has a few likes of mine and around 200 friends, with a relatively small number of messages. Google has my multi-year mail history (content plus a pretty big social graph that means far more than a few old school friends), my searches (and therefore interests), what adverts I've clicked on, which pages get the most traffic on my websites. It has documents I've worked on with friends and associates. It has my calendar. I've got a bunch of sites sitting on Google servers. When I use my iPhone, Google provides the maps and knows where I'm going.
This is a really good point, and highlights a major difference between information derived from users based on them asking for services and explicit data users have "declared". The derived information may actually be more valuable, as you say, but because the declared data is more direct and voluntary, it has higher PERCEIVED value (at least it did to me). This may be one of the reasons FB is more attractive then Google right now- and perception is everything when it comes to valuation. Great post, thanks.
Facebook really changed the world, as far as new advertising platforms go.. as for communication, it is funny how many of us continue to use IRC just as effectively as 15 or so years ago.
He took a job without having any idea what he will be doing?
Facebook will likely give him the latitude to write his own job description and recruit his own team. The end result hopefully will be something that he enjoys, and that benefits Facebook and its users.
Wave was a horrible implementation of a decent idea. For the longest time it felt like they did absolutely no work on the wave project (at least not from the users perspective).
I think the main problem with wave was that it wasn't solving any problems it was just mashing up a lot of features in to one application and never recovered from performance issues.
Google Wave was a great idea but making it standalone application was the mistake, IMO. I am pretty sure the ideas Google Wave generated will be implemented on the right application someday. Facebook might be the platform for Lars to implement his pet project (Wave).
Some people need structure to get things done. Other people find structure limits their ability to do things. The latter usually happens because their imagination exceeds the imagination of those who create the structure.
It's like two CS guys who both have an interest in solving big problems efficiently. They have ideas. They talk to each other about their ideas. They really love working on their ideas. One of them gets a ton of research money so he asks the other to come work with him in the new lab allowing him to work on his ideas as he wants.
It's also well known that many Googlers love their 20% personal (pet) project time and this job description sounds like it took that 20% and juiced it to 100%.
True. However, you did ask specifically why this would be an exciting job title. This is my interpretation on why this job title is actually "kick ass."
That's really nothing but a standard technical fellowship job description. It exists at many, if not most, large-scale tech companies, although it's not the sort of position that shows up in classified ads.
This is a great move for Lars. Look for him to integrate his Wave vision with FB chat. Wave wasn't bad it just never came close to critical mass and with Facebook he gets that instantly.
One could say Wave failed because of a lack of users. Especially users meaningfully connected to each other. Really it doesn't matter if the software is shit. Millions of people flock to crappy PHP forums all over the world. Facebook has those users with reasons to talk to each other.
Whether that makes Facebook more important than Google I don't think is what's really going on here.
