[xnx]

> I mean, after all, if you cut out the immense spend they're making to throw ads at you, how much would it actually cost to provide the "good" part of Facebook's services to an average user? It really isn't much and it continues to drop.

I've often wondered about this. A social network could be operated quite inexpensively if you didn't have to pay for sales, marketing, attention hacking, etc. (Twitter is kind of testing this hypothesis.) Social networks should be as boring and everyday as blogs and email.