Facebook shmacebook! Does FB have real value?

Farhad Manjoo at Slate has a new article on the true value of Facebook.  Essentially, IMHO, he's saying Facebook's lasting value will be the spinoff concepts and innovations.

I love this quote from a former 'booker:

Finally, let’s hear from Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook employee who quit because he couldn’t stand the idea of all of the company’s highly educated engineers spending their time on something so meaningless. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," Hammerbacher told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. "That sucks."

As an example of spinoff concepts, Facebook has taken SSO (Single Sign On) to the non-enterprise world:

Take KurbKarma, a fantastic new app that lets people who are leaving parking spaces earn a kind of virtual currency when they alert the world to their spot. Technically you don’t need Facebook to use KurbKarma. (The system does not depend on real-world identity to work.) But the app—like pretty much every app nowadays—lets you sign up through Facebook, which eliminates the pain of creating a new account.