I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and thus bring down our GDP". Come on guys, they found it fun to take up the challenges of making such a thing. Why should we look down upon them because they are not solving a "real" problem. To recite acangiano's example, technologies like memcached came from livejournal which was considered the biggest mode of pass time in pop culture. And even if zynga is not open sourcing something like that, so what? They are working on something they find is fun (and can make them shitloads of money) I do not think its upto us to judge their intentions (more over even if we did that, they would just sit on their pile of money and say FU).
By that logic all the game companies and social sites just shut down. (okey this is a major exaggeration of what you said, but added that because I find that a little funny.)
Don't get it wrong. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something useful for society or not. There is no general way to judge that, but it is always a personal decision based on ethics the person considers worth to follow.
By that logic all the game companies and social sites just shut down. (okey this is a major exaggeration of what you said, but added that because I find that a little funny.)
Edit: spellings