(All these Brilliant People at) Facebook Make Me Sad. Eran Hammer-Lahav, Yahoo!'s Director of Standards Development, at his own site, hueniverse:

This is not a post about open, about standards, about privacy, or really any criticism of Facebook in any way. In fact, the problem is just how unbelievable the Facebook team is (in a good way). The sheer strength of their talent is almost unmatched in our industry, past and present. The problem is, all that talent is building something I just don't care about, and no one is left for anything else.

...Last month at Open Web Foo, sitting outside with about a dozen of some really smart and highly connected folks, I asked people to name three "wow" experiences they had with new web products in the last year. Most had none to share. I asked them to think back 3 years and the list filled up in minutes.

Forget about solving the world's problem - if you don't care for Facebook, the web it just boring. It's stale.

There are many reasons why engineers want to work for Facebook, from the potential windfall to learning just how they are able to ship so much technology so fast. It is an engineering dreamland. But there is one great reason why they shouldn't: because Facebook will be great without them, but the web might not.

On Facebook, too, there's less interesting stuff being shared.

The three-year-old "reverse graffiti" photo I blogged yesterday had been posted on tumblr and received "57,334 notes." The vast majority of these notes are either "x liked this" or "x reblogged this." Yawn.

Those old handmade Websites and Geocities pages could be ugly, but people shared what they cared about in the real world, their expertise in obscure niches, their collections of old Christmas tree lights, just jazz, Citroën Specials or original bird paintings.

There is a collection of "chicken little miniture figurines" circa 2007, but the blog hasn't updated since 2007.

Now, thanks to Facebook herding, people mostly tell us instead where they are drinking coffee. It's hard to explain your collection in depth by punching keys on on a phone. And if you're spending your time on line playing Angry Birds, you're probably not collecting much except thumb calluses anyway.

Eran wrote that post in November, 2010. His blog hasn't been updated this year.

Imaginary friends: "I have made friends (mostly through Twitter and Facebook) with people from almost every country in this region, but I have proof of the existence of only a small percentage of them." -- Israeli blogger Elizabeth Tsurkov, cited in the Times' 'Gay Girl in Damascus' Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact as "betrayed and shocked but mostly angry" that her "friendship" with Syrian-American lesbian protestor Amina Arraf was actually correspondence with a 40-year-old American man living in Scotland.

What a colossal waste of time.