

Facebook: A Great Start to 2009 - ashishk
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=46881667130

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unalone
I enjoyed Marco Arment's response: <http://tumblelog.marco.org/68936456>

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indigoviolet
except that these are 30-day active users; 1 in 4 is not a spammer, and the
fact that the distribution is skewed only makes facebook's stat more amazing.

and someone who runs a "short blogging service" in today's world shouldn't be
complaining about making things of "lasting value".

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unalone
Spoken like somebody who doesn't use Tumblr. Making multi-content posts east
is not the same as "short blogging." I mean, you can't _make_ a short blogging
criticism considering Twitter's out there, but Tumblr's system isn't short
posting. Marco's a co-founder and he writes long posts frequently. Rather,
it's a method of streamlining: if I want to discuss something I can. Tumblr
used to call itself a scrapbook, and that's as good a description of it as
any.

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indigoviolet
Would you consider tweets to be creations of lasting value? I think I could
argue quite convincingly that Facebook's network, the connections it inspires
and facilitates, and the social interaction it makes possible is of far more
lasting value to the world and its people than any tweeting or blogging,
especially when they're as devoid of content as the posts I've seen.

Making snide clever comments is easy, building something that is actually
making a difference isn't.

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unalone
I actually made the same comment in response to Marco: Facebook is not
valueless. Neither is Tumblr, though. I don't know if it's "making a
difference" in the sense of, say, social change, but it's providing the best
product of its kind in the market. That has value to me.

I don't use Twitter. I think it's stupid. But creating a vast opt-in,
entirely-indexed community is something of value. The fact that companies can
search to find real-time who's talking about them is big and will be leveraged
more in the future, and the fact that its APIs let Tweets be used for nearly
anything is big too. So it _has_ value, even if it's value I will never need
myself.

