> It's easy to forget that there are more praiseworthy goals in the world than having a successful social network when that's what everyone actually praises.

I became depressed the day when realized that some of most bright engineers working for one of the most unique companies of our times spent their time and energy and intellectual resources on cloning a social network (google+ vs. FB). And I'm not really claiming that they should save the world or anything, I'm just saying that with the huge amount of data that they have gathered so far and considering the human capital they have available they could start answering a lot of very interesting questions, which gave bugged us as an intelligent species for quite a long time (think linguistics-related issues, for example).