Get serious

O'Reilly: It's time to do something worthy with the Web.

Mann: We can do better.

Dan Lyons: Is this the best geeks can do?

Money quote from Lyons:

My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.) this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve. If I were funding these guys I might go home scratching my head about what those kids are doing with all of my millions. Maybe there is a point to what they’re doing, but honestly, what great problem are these companies trying to solve? Sitting there watching this spectacle — watching these guys unable to simply explain what they do and and how they are going to make a business out of it – it was staggering to think that someone has entrusted these people with very large sums of money. But someone has. I weep for those people.

Not that this means the disappearance of frivolity from the interwebs, but could this be a sign of creeping impatience with big brains focusing on insignificant things?

UPDATE: I appreciate the irony of this post's placement between two, yes, frivolous amusements.