Bubbles and Facebook

A few days back, danah asked:

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

This made me think of my sure-fire bubble indicator:

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.

[...}The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!

In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble

By this measure, we are well into a bubble in the Valley, (Google being the top company of choice for MBA's is one example), but Facebook has a perfect conjunction here - growing out of Harvard and the Ivy League, it started out with the very crowd of high-achieving conformists that danah called hegemonic teens, who make up my leading indicator, so when they connected with the tech crowd the mentos hit the coke.