Light blogging week this week. But check out Farhad Manjoo, who insists that Mark Zuckerberg, not anyone else, invented Facebook and deserves the credit. I’m not too familiar with the details, but this passage caught my eye (emphasis added):
I suspect we’re mainly interested in how Facebook got started because we want to know whom to credit for coming up with a brilliant idea. In America, we root for the guy with the great idea over the guy who didn’t sleep for a year making it happen. If Zuckerberg really did come up with the idea for a campuswide social network, he deserves all the billions that are coming to him. But if he stole the idea, why should he profit from something that someone else thought up first?
Easy answer: because Zuckerberg did it better. If you look at the early history of Facebook, you’ll see that almost nothing about it was a new idea. Even if it’s true that the Winklevosses came up with a plan for a Harvard social network first, they were obviously inspired by other sites. Social-networking sites—even ones focused on college students—had existed long before Facebook. The real value of Facebook wasn’t that it did something new, but that it did something old better—faster, prettier, more useful, and more addictive. This is a story we’ve heard before in the likes of the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, Windows, and Google. None of these were new ideas, but we shouldn’t think any less of them because of it. Ideas are overrated. In technology, what really matters is execution.
