My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

The web as a rainforest

tech
by Antonio on

This is my last bit on this whole Facebook thing (not quite sure why
this week's announcement has rubbed me so wrong):

I am currently waiting out a rainstorm at the Yunque national forest,
one of the only tropical rainforests in the US national park system.
What is amazing about this place is how heterogenous it is, from the
fauna to the flora. There are something like 225 species of trees alone!

It is really a sight to behold. Looking at it, I couldn't help but see
this interwoven set of animals, plants, and trees as a good metaphor
for the web as a whole. It thrives because of how diverse it is.

And yet asking one of the parks folks whether there was any common
element to the speed of development of the ecosystem as a whole, I got
an interesting answer: apparently the flow of water, from cloud to
rain to trees to the ground and back is the only thing that governs
the speed of growth, and it would seem that the biggest threats the
reserve has faced over time have come from global environmental
factors that affect this general flow (such as global warming).

Similarly on the web, it has been the flow of hyperlinks, from page to
page that I think has governed the speed of development. Between http
and HTML, we've gotten the same basic elements that have allowed for
the heterogeneity of the web: from amazon to wikipedia and millions of
smaller species that hav thrived.

If this Facebook thing takes off in a big way, it has the chance to
evolve the link in interesting and very powerful ways. No doubt. But
at the behest of one company. This can not possibly be a good thing.

Google was made possible because of the web. And today it is
incredibly powerful. But if it were to go away tomorrow, we'd still be
left with the web- it'd be like the National Park Service pulling out
of the Yunque- mostly because until recently they've sought to curate
the web and not evolve it in a way that makes it less rAinforest and
more zoo.

The park folks keep telling us that this is our park and that
protecting it is our responsibility to the future. It strikes me that
the same could be asked of us on behalf of the open web.

(Excuse the typos. Typed on an iPhone in the middle of a rainforest.
In the rain)