> If Facebook had an "export my friend list to Excel" button, then plenty of non-programmers could perform this task using existing tools.
The task was to send alerts whenever a friend was nearby. Excel is amazing for non-professional programmers, but it doesn't deal well with changing data, unless you want to click the "export my friend list to Excel" button every five minutes. There are tools that will act as real-time data sources in Excel but it's not a natural fit. If we did nothing but make "real-time Excel" it would still be incredibly useful for a lot of people.
The task was to send alerts whenever a friend was nearby. Excel is amazing for non-professional programmers, but it doesn't deal well with changing data, unless you want to click the "export my friend list to Excel" button every five minutes. There are tools that will act as real-time data sources in Excel but it's not a natural fit. If we did nothing but make "real-time Excel" it would still be incredibly useful for a lot of people.