“[Google] makes a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense and they’re all bored to tears and totally disappointed because they really really really thought they were going to do something meaningful with their lives and now they’re just worker bees–pampered worker bees, sure, but still…”

Others point out that many of departing employees are going to companies similar to Google, but merely younger and more new and exciting. Three early employees left to found the microblog site Twitter; three more to launch the video sharing site Ooyala. Forty employees have left for Facebook, accounting for 10 percent of Facebook’s staff at the last count.

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss. I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me