Very interesting ideas. I have been dealing with some of this myself as my company has been developing a lead management product over the past year. We started trying to incorporate every feature under the sun thinking people would use it. In my experience the biggest problem seems to be that for each feature you add, the lower value of each feature becomes. Maybe this would be called "feature-value dilution" if there isn't already something better to describe it. In an attempt to solve the problem we have been breaking out the larger chunks and developing them as separate products and then tying them back together via public API.
I believe that with anything the extent that Facebook can do for good equals the extent that it can do for bad. So yes, they have a lot of information that could be used for good, bad, or (more likely) some of both. I certainly don't recall anyone FORCING anyone to click a "like" button nor have a Facebook account. If you are worried about this sort of thing then don't do it. I don't understand why there are so many people attempting to create a rebellion against a service that no one forced them to be a part of.
I've been lurking around here for the past few months but have only posted once up until now. I like the vibe here and I also enjoy hacking together web apps. This one is fairly simple but sprang out of a personal need.
I like to travel a lot (specifically Vegas) and I have a reputation amongst my friends about finding good deals. At least once a month I'll have someone ask me to help them plan their trip or to find them a good deal. Generally I go through Hotwire or Priceline and use information available on the internet to deduce the hotel I'm likely to receive. I wanted to make this process a little less tedious.
First step was obtaining a Hotwire API key and gathering up some known hotel data.After about 8 hours of work I have a way to search hotels by date, rooms, and travelers. The results are what you would see on Hotwire for the same query but many of them have "Probable Hotel(s)" listed along with them if a match was found.
This will likely be an evolving project as I add more features (adding links to Trip Advisor reviews now, next direct links to the hotels). Right now there are a lot of obvious oversights (no validation, etc). I am not sure if anyone here will find it useful but if so, enjoy!
Colleges are only partially there for academics. All in all they exist to prepare you for "the real world" and to be a productive part of society. Certainly you can go to college and not socialize and not watch/play any sports and focus only on preparing for your career in academia. That's a choice. However, most people gain a lot more out of their college experience outside of the classroom. I was a student-athlete in the ACC and I certainly gained a lot more preparation for life after school from my experience as an athlete than as a student. To say sports aren't important in college is simply naive. As a matter of fact, to the poster that said "that doesn't mean kegs are good for education" I'll play devil's advocate and say that there is a ton of education that comes out of socializing and partying. It helps you become a lot more comfortable in social settings. In turn this helps you in other facets of your future career.
tldr; IMO, out-of-class activities during college are just as important if not more important than the in class education.