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)
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 14, 2008)
The Economist review on Don Tapscott's new book, "Grown Up Digital," reminded me of how lucky kids growing up in the "net generation" are today. Based on a huge survey of kids growing up today, here is his summary of this new crop just coming out of school:
Mr Tapscott identifies eight norms that define Net Geners, which he believes everyone should take on board to avoid being swept away by the sort of generational tsunami that helped Barack Obama beat John McCain. Net Geners value freedom and choice in everything they do. They love to customise and personalise. They scrutinise everything. They demand integrity and openness, including when deciding what to buy and where to work. They want entertainment and play in their work and education, as well as their social life. They love to collaborate. They expect everything to happen fast. And they expect constant innovation.
Sounds like the ideal employee to me! More significantly, as Detroit crumbles in part because of the inability of a huge workforce to retrain itself quickly enough, I'm left wondering whether this cohort just coming out of school now might be able to avoid some of the same pitfalls.
The whole concept of Tapscott's sequel reminded me of this YouTube video I came across last week on the "Networked Student:"
It's worth viewing this video and wondering whether the education our kids are getting today at school prepares them as well as the narrator of this short piece might like. My bet: for the most part, no, though scattered through all manner of schools today, we've probably got great glimmers of hope in those teachers that are looking forward and thinking about what skills might be relevant to this new generation of students.
Finally, this is where I come to my second plug for Corey Doctorow's "Little Brother" and the kids he portrays. He might not have had Tapscott in mind when he wrote the novel, but his heroes sure do possess all eight of the aforementioned qualities of a net-genner and the book is a testament to how useful these can be in a pinch.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 24, 2008)
The latest issue of the economist argues that Obama should be wary of thinking too much like FDR in trying to stimulate the economy via "New Deal" like government spending programs because the fundamentals of the economy are different now. Separately various blogs were arguing this weekend that companies like Google and Apple represent the new industrial order with their capital efficiency and ability to generate loads of free cashflow very quickly. To think, just 8 years ago Apple was almost broke and now they are sitting on a $25b cash hoarde thanks to the iPod, the iPhone and Vista's flub.
Still I'd be interested to understand whether the fundamentals of the economy really have changed in a structural way or whether what we see when we look at companies like apple and google is a better, faster implementation of high growth businesses with incredible returns to scale that are facilitated by the network effects common in high tech.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 27, 2008)
Easily worth a third of a latte. Fabulous use of the accelerometer and multi-touch and a great checkvalve for not going nuts as your frustration climbs.
Trust me, indispensable if you sit in a lot of long meetings.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 8, 2008)
We keep arguing at work about the iPhone versus the Nokia phones and about the significance of the word "platform" when it comes to mobile computing.
Whether the high resolution touch screen plus the gestures that are now called "multi-touch" really represent a new platform per se is a debateable point, especially when the parallels are drawn to the PC. It may be that multi-touch is really more like the GUI in that what it brings is an order of magnitude increase in accessibility for everyone else who has thus far seen the mobile as nothing more than a wireless phone.
At least that is one thing we all agree on- the onramp for the next billion people is going to come from something that looks more like an iPhone and less like a laptop or pc.
A week eating sausages and schnitzelâ wowee a little too much.
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.