Dude, it's Instagram. It lets you add faux vintage to your pictures. Building pyramids we are not.
Making a network for sharing something trivial among millions upon millions of people is still valuable.
The pyramids were friggin' tombs satisfying the superstitions of a few powerful individuals. I'd say that that is far far more trivial than a social network that provides connection and satisfaction for millions.
However, the poster I replied to did not substantiate the analogy and comparison of:
nascent computer science::geometry
Instagram::pyramids
Also, something I begrudge about the comparison: Ancient geometry had nowhere near the formalism and maturity of study that computer science as a field does. And even if it did? Computer science doesn't seem to be closer than arms-reach to most projects.
Hell, your modern operations and engineering in many cases is just throwing together other people's libraries and fiddling with config files until you have a liquidity event that lets you buy real talent--themselves pretty far removed from the greats of the field of computer science.
About the only thing the pyramids and your socialized twitterscapegrams have in common is the waste of thousands of man-years of productivity and intellect in the pursuit of ego and fleeting fame.
Seriously, folks, let's not treat our industry with such gravitas.
Things that ultimately become useful are most of times never conceived in a straight trajectory. It's a curvy road. Claiming Instagram was a bad turn is just purely naive conjecture by people who delude themselves into thinking they have the magic map.
All we know is, more people than most countries' populations are using this invention to make their lives better. For me at least, Instagram was a massive shift in Camera interaction. I have never captured random moments on daily basis like that before. I only took pictures when I thought I visited some place important, not that great coffee I had in some new city. A good memory to have captured.
(It's really, really hard not to have disdain for this sort of thing, incidentally.)
It's not making the market more efficient as nothing but a close to duplicate graph is being created along with pictures that have slightly more value than Facebook pictures, or any other.
Why should we care?
This is not innovation, it is a small convenience that does not better us in any real way.
[1] Yes, the expletive was entirely necessary.
My baby daughter's grandparents and great grandmother live in another country. Her great grandmother is too old to travel, and so doesn't get to see us as often as we'd all like, so a very simple system that enables her to see regular photos of her great granddaughter is a wonderful thing. Sure, we could snap a polaroid and mail it, or try to educate her more so she could manage Facebook, but in reality these are less likely to happen and more difficult to make happen.
I'm aware in the grand scheme of things Instagram isn't important, and I'm aware it's primary motivator wasn't the situation above. However, I'd suggest being less quick to say it doesn't better us in any way, or even to say it isn't innovation.
Not all innovation needs to change the world.
[1] Was it really?
That said, you're clearly too emotional about this to have a reasonable discussion.
This is a false dichotomy. It's like comparing Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" to Jimi Henrix's "Purple Haze". Egyptians may have built the pyramids, but they also built thousands of small homes and fields that don't have any value to us today. Jimi's work was likewise born amid a bunch of forgettable pop songs by others that served only to entertain for a short time. Great things are born in a sea of the mediocre. You can't optimize this away. In fact, to do so will do far more harm than good because it stifles and crushes the mind's ability to explore.
The goal of geometry wasn't to build the pyramids any more than computer science was to build the Internet. At the time, each solved a business purpose (farms for the former, ballistic calculations for the latter). They were the byproduct of several big minds that wanted to build something else beyond the practical. Ask yourself how pyramids allow me to build a better farm? How does the Internet make ballistic calculations easier?
Everything of cultural significance throughout history had little or no practical value at the time. The pyramids were huge mountains of stone, had large and priceless paintings put inside, and filled with golden items. For what? Some dead guy. Leonardo shunned practical architecture, math, and anatomy so he could paint some girl. Bach was genius in patterns and sound, but all he wanted to do was bang on ivory keys. Even science takes a long time to serve a practical purpose. If kings and nobles asked for the practical from Galileo et al., we wouldn't have the telescope or even bothered studying astronomy. [1] Every significant song, play, artwork, architecture, and book serve almost no practical purpose. Do we do away with them because of their apparent lack of practical purpose?
Instagram still had to solve problems that aren't directly related to hipster pictures. They had to solve image processing in real time with a small device. They had to solve the problem of updating and messaging tens of thousands of nodes with millions of users. They had to solve network outages, slow connections, and availability at scale. It taught the Instagram team those concepts can be used to solve other problems. Now they have both the technical knowledge and the capital to build something else. Maybe they solve a "big" problem or they go off to build some other widget.
I hate the obsessive view that everything needs a practical purpose. Why does Instagram et al. teams need to solve any "big" problem? When you back up far enough, most services don't solve any big problem at all. Poverty isn't solved by Google's search algorithm. War isn't solved because Paypal made it easier to buy stuff online. Hunger isn't fixed by Amazon's internet shopping. If we measure everything by the metric of solving really hard problems, then almost everything we do every day fails to live up to that metric. Is that really the metric we want to use to measure the usefulness of a business or product?
People are working on the hard problems we are facing. They are very passionate about solving them, even just a little bit. Looking at Silicon Valley and saying they aren't solving any real problem is being incredibly insulting to those people who are working on the big problems. It's like saying that "If only those SV people would look into such and such problem, it would be solved." No it won't. We aren't Superman. We would only be adding our great minds to the sea of great minds already working on those problems.
Family Guy [2] sums up my feelings of whether or not a service/product solves a "big" problem. Go out and do something you find interesting. Who knows what it will become or if it will serve a useful purpose.
[1]: I understand that Astronomy was used to plan for farming, harvest, and other time keeping purposes, but that was known thousands of years prior to the Middle Age thinkers. What 17th century problem did finding out that points of light in the sky went around other points of light in the sky? Probably a whole lot of nothing. Now that knowledge is very useful, but it took 300+ years to become practical.