You gotta be kidding me. Social media will leave nothing behind? How about a communications infrastructure spanning the whole world and connecting people to both friends and other people of interest in real-time, no matter where they are (in the bus, in the street, at home, at their computer), enabling the most rapid spread of information ever seen, and potentially enabling the world to start functioning as a sort of "human computer", with intelligent sensors and intelligent nodes (people) and lightning fast communications between them?
How can you point at that and say that Twitter and Facebook are wasting their time?
Maybe it's not even a tech legacy. Millions and soon billions of people have a larger internet footprint than before. They communicate with each other in far more intimate and elaborate ways. It's a cultural legacy.
> How about a communications infrastructure spanning ...
tcp/ip? The infrastructure has been here for a long time. The reason why people start to "connect" with everybody now is because computers and mobile IP devices are becoming really cheap. People would be still communicating in realtime without twitter, facebook, co. SMTP, IRC and IM protocols were here before Mr. Zuckerberg knew how to spell PHP.
Those were computer-to-computer, not people-to-people. The only people who could use those were technical.
Facebook, Twitter, et al, built a communication infrastructure between people. That's about much more than just programming or designing computer communication protocols.
It's a common fallacy from programmers to think that the hard part of "build a system for 100 million users" is the programming.
Emails are a very unproductive way to handle communications between hundreds of people in your social network. They provide no ambient awareness of what's going on with the people you know.
They were people-to-people communication infrastructure, sure, in the same way as a dirt road is a road. But there's a big difference between an 8-lane highway and a dirt road, and there's as big a difference between email and twitter. Both are a kind of infrastructure.
This is the really depressing thing about the hype from this bubble. "Web scale" is decentralized open protocols over full unrestricted IP, not shitty NATed HTTP to a rack of servers in the US.
How can you point at that and say that Twitter and Facebook are wasting their time?