Did anyone watch that video? I can't help but get the sense that the web world overestimates its own importance. One of the engineers that built FB video: "With this job [...] you can go home saying, I've changed the world."<p>Really?<p>I guess I'd make a terrible FB/Google/Twitter/Whatever employee. I understand that yes it's cool and communication is faster and easier than before, but - seriously - is it really world-changing?<p>The discovery of agriculture, the advent of organized religion, the dissolution of organized religion, the idea of self-determination, the harnessing of electricity - these things changed the world.<p>But adding a single feature to a single website - really? Would someone who was cryogenically frozen just before FB video was put online, and then was unfrozen after, be able to comprehend the world they were living in? Do the same thought experiment with organized religion.<p>"But people were skeptical of other world-changing technology or ideology at the time, too." Yes. You're right. And I'm skeptical now. Doesn't make me wrong.<p>I understand that they're in California and that it's apparently fashionable to imitate Jobs-like megalomaniacal optimism about one's own importance. I understand that self-motivation requires them to believe that what they do is the highest cause, and that it's important for one's career to appear to be a Jihad on behalf of the employer.<p>And don't get me wrong, FB is a great website and a really useful one which I use regularly to find people. But can we please agree that it's not world-changing. Here's what's great: it doesn't have to be. You do not <i>need</i> to be a hero. If your code doesn't change the world, that does not diminish you (if you never have a true, deep human friendship - <i>that</i> diminishes you).
Maybe less <i>is</i> sometimes more. Facebook serving 1B/month while Youtube serves 1.2B/day.<p>But, last I heard, Google is yet to make money off Youtube. Facebook may be finding that video can be an value-adding supplement to its business, not just a bandwidth-sucking enticement to the lowest-common-denominator of the masses. [ "not that there's anything <i>wrong</i> with the latter" - it just doesn't seem to make for a profit center, even for Google.]