Facebook, critical mass, tipping points and third world machine shops

Hey, do you read The Facebook? It's been around for a while, but it seems like it's hit some kind of tipping point recently. Which I guess makes sense. If you have 20 friends and 2 of them have facebook, who cares, but if 19 of them do, well, you're kinda obligated. If you look at the number of users graph here, it really looks like the beginning of an exponential growth curve.

Anyway, my point is, these things happen. Something will grow steadily and slowly for a long time, until some previously unknown size is reached, or some external event happens, and suddenly the thing will start to snowball.

The bootstrapping Multimachine, basically, an all-in one, easy to make, easy to maintain machine shop, kinda smells like it has that potential. I think you could have this thing growing by one or two villages a month for a while, then bam, suddenly they're everywhere. Aid agencies are shipping over old cams and chucks instead of grain that never gets distributed. Swords in to plowshares, instant industrial revolution.