“With the less-than-spectacular launch of the Facebook IPO, I’ve heard a number of people speculating that the social networking boom is played out and that innovation will now turn elsewhere. I think they’re missing out on a big area that is still left to conquer, an Internet breakthrough that will be way bigger than Facebook.

The rap against Facebook is that the activity it captures—essentially, a half billion people gossiping about their own lives—is so ephemeral that it could all disappear overnight, which is essentially what happened to Facebook’s precursor, MySpace. As Rich Lowry put it, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the Henry Ford of goofing off. By the way, for my Facebook friends, let me add that I think this criticism is unfair. I’ve found Facebook useful, for example, as a news feed where people I know post interesting articles they have come across. But imagine if much of the same technology were used to capture an activity with far more substantial and enduring value.

Let’s put it this way: if you can build a $100 billion company by using the Internet to replace the college yearbook—imagine what you can do if you use the Internet to replace college.”

Head on over to RealClearMarkets to see the how the same technology that has revolutionized the way you find cute pictures of cats is going to revolutionize how you learn, how you get hired, and how you work.