That's essentially what Facebook is. I'm not sure what you mean by "a marker for success in life," but most people consider Mark Zuckerberg to be successful.
I consider Zuckerberg to be rich. As far as I can tell from his and FB's public-facing personas, he's a failure at the things that really matter -- integrity, positive impact on others, respect of peers for anything other than wealth acquisition.
If you're actually arguing that FB doesn't have a positive impact on people, you are so far off the mark that you can't be reasoned with.
You might be able to argue about Zuckerberg's methods, but the end result is that he created something that made hundreds of millions of people's lives better.
Unless you've done the same, you don't really have the moral high ground here.
I'll ignore the ad hominem and the argument by implied assertion and assume that we have different definitions of "making people's lives better". What's yours?
I'm not attacking you personally, I just can't grasp your argument. I would think we could take as a given that most Facebook users would say Facebook makes their life better by allowing them to keep in touch with friends, etc. Again, you could argue that Facebook's management has done business in a way you don't approve of, but Facebook the product has undoubtedly had a net positive impact on hundreds of millions of people all over the world, not to mention the thousands of entrepreneurs and businesses that are building on top of the platform.
Studies show Facebook has created over 500,000 high level, high paying jobs.
This is a social network for God's sake, not a coal mine.
it is one marker of success. being utterly and fervently in love with one's work is another, and this may or may not coincide with massive growth. dmor is correct that life is short; given that "making a dent in the universe" is kind of relative (see this excellent piece on our small ness: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4674932) and some times more ego-driven than altruistic,
I see no shame in optimizing for happiness in one's lifetime. For some people this may simply mean a decent salary (which may not be an "average" goal for some people), but this was not how I read this piece. The OP appears to have found her own way to do something she loves, profitably and within a short amount of time. This is fantastic. VCs may not want to fund her, and it doesn't look like she wants them to. pg points out businesses like this in his growth essay with no judgment. I wouldn't pass them either.
One could argue that Facebook's success still remains to be seen. Yes, it captured the masses quickly - but its long term viability has yet to be solidified. It hasn't quite found its business model and the rapid declines of social networks have been well documented. See Myspace...
