An iteration with huge improvement. Would you say if Google wouldn't have happened, we would be fine searching on Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos? And webmail would be fine and dandy with Yahoo Mail and Hotmail if there was no Gmail?

Facebook was at least that big a jump over its previous alternatives. That's the point.

Personally I'm only on FB because my family insist on being there. The site is ugly confusing, I do not get any rewards from being there except that I, again, see my family's posts.

If my family was on whatever other social network, I'd be there.

So perhaps we should discuss how FB actually got luck and got people to sign up instead of praising some innovative web services.

Hint: games and cat pictures.

There's a magnitude improvement from Altavista to Google. Not so with Facebook over an alternative.

Were you using Friendster in 2004? At that time, Facebook was a real quantum leap over a site that didn't let you log in because it was too slow.

For me, at least, that was the critical step - having a site that just worked.

I take what I said back. For me personally, FB was a step back in terms of improving the quality of life, let alone any sort of leap.