Facebook: a brilliant time-waster $100B time-waster

Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” Compared with Facebook, Google is the King James Bible.

Facebook: a brilliant time-waster—Rich Lowry - NYPOST.com
 The ‘genius’ of Facebook

By RICH LOWRY

Last Updated:12:06 AM, May 19, 2012

Posted:11:11 PM, May 18, 2012

‘If time be of all things the most precious,” Benjamin Franklin said, “wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.” But he had never heard of a status update.

Facebook is the world’s foremost purveyor of information you shouldn’t care about. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile. He has mastered it on an industrial scale and is riding it to a vast fortune.

At more than $100 billion, the valuation of Facebook equals the annual GDP of Morocco or Vietnam, countries that don’t top anyone’s list of economic powerhouses, butdoactually produce some things of value.

Can 900 million people, the roughly one-eighth of the planet that uses Facebook, be wrong? If they’re passing around photos of pets in party costumes, telling us whether they are having a good or bad hair day and playing the farming simulation game FarmVille, the answer is, “Why, yes they can.”

Facebook has transformed oversharing from an annoying habit of the poorly socialized into the very stuff of daily interactions. No thought is too banal, no event too minor, no mood too passing, no photo too embarrassing to be posted on Facebook.

Facebook has been a boon to employers vetting prospective employees and to divorce lawyers looking for incriminating evidence. Once, taking vodka shots out of the bellybutton of your friend at the bar at 2 a.m. might have been an ill-considered caper to laugh about the next day. Now the photo may well end up on your “timeline.” In the world of Facebook, everyone is his or her own personal TMZ.*

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*The letters TMZ stand for thirty-mile zone, referring to the "studio zone" within a 30 miles (48 km) radius of the intersection of West Beverly Boulevard and North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.^[5] Shooting within this zone is considered local. Locations outside this zone are subject to mileage and travel time charges by the talent and crew.