
Facebook Video: Now Serving 1 Billion Views A Month - CalmQuiet
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/22/facebook-video-now-serving-1-billion-views-a-month-including-this-amazing-zuck-impression/
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caffeine
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."

Really?

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?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 _need_ 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 - _that_ diminishes you).

~~~
jamesbritt
"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."

I get the feeling that so-called social media is often largely _insular_
media. People get their circle of friends and associates, and that becomes
their whole world, which in turn becomes _the_ whole world.

There are people who believe that if they put something on Twitter or FB then
they've announced something to the world, and now _everybody_ knows. The idea
that vast numbers of people are not only not on one or anther social media
tool, but simply do not give a rat's ass, is a completely alien concept.

~~~
caffeine
_People get their circle of friends and associates, and that becomes their
whole world, which in turn becomes the whole world._

You're right - and I'm afraid it might be even worse than that.

A world built of online "contacts" rather than real life relationships is a
shallow one at best. So 10,000 people watched my video, and 1000 of them
became my friends. How many of those will console me when I lose a parent? And
if they won't - then why am I spending time on them?

One justification is that it's the "whole world." In other words, it's
_important._ Maybe it doesn't mean anything - but it's "very important".

I just hope a whole generation of people (myself included) don't wake up one
day to discover that we have no real social ties, no firm bedrock on which to
anchor identities and lives in the real world.

------
JournalistHack
Maybe less _is_ sometimes more. Facebook serving 1B/month while Youtube serves
1.2B/day.

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 _wrong_ with the latter" - it just doesn't seem
to make for a profit center, even for Google.]

~~~
Shakescode
Of course there's no _evidence/data_ cited that it is yet a _profitable_
profit center for Facebook.

