There’s nothing to wake you up after a trans-Atlantic flight and a healthy dose of jetlag like stumbling across — in running togs, no less — the man who invented the World Wide Web.
“Out for a run? Mind if I join?” I asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in the lobby of the Sol Meliá hotel in Bilbao, Spain. With a nod, we set out along the Ría de Bilbao with Thomas Roessler, a colleague of Berners-Lee from the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.
The W3C, through which the Web’s creator still gently steers it to this day, sets the open standards that allow the open, free Web to live across Internet-connected devices and platforms around the world — and it provides for the advance of those platforms by introducing new and improved protocols, those things that make websites so much better than they were in 1994, when the W3C was founded.
Our run-in wasn’t some globetrotting coincidence: Berners-Lee and I were both speaking at the Bilbao Web Summit, an Internet conference held in the Basque Country in conjunction with the consortium’s semiannual advisory-committee meeting here.
I won’t kid anyone: There was no question in my mind who the main attraction was here. (Though I did make an appearance in the local society pages, along with Xabier “Xabi” Uribe-Etxebarria, a Bilbaoan Web entrepreneur who organized the Summit.) But as we ran past the Guggenheim and talked about Bilbao’s renewal — the city has transformed itself from a center of steel mills to a hub of semantic technologies — it struck me how unself-centered this Internet rock star was.
Oh, and Roessler smoked us both, if you were wondering.
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Deia, a local newspaper, covered the closing reception of the summit, and also wondered at Berners-Lee’s humility: “If the Web were a kingdom, he’d be the queen mother,” wrote Jon Mujika. Instead, he’s just the father of a free Web republic.
Sir Tim — he was dubbed a Knight Commander by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 for his work developing the protocols that undergird the Web — shared his thoughts and concerns for the future of his baby at a Summit keynote Tuesday. In short, he called for the Web to stay free. Not free as in free beer, mind you, but free as in free speech. He’s particularly concerned about the development of off-Web apps for smartphones and tablets, which he said removes content from “the conversation” that happens on the open Web.
The freedom of the Web is certainly more than he can actually ensure as director of the W3C, but his words do, at least to Internet purists such as myself, carry a certain moral weight. Only time will tell whether today’s robber barons, the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and the newly minted Reid Hoffman, feel the same way.
Whether or not Sir Tim is Web royalty, in the right crowd, Berners-Lee can pack a house, like the 2,164-seat opera hall in the Palacio Euskalduna, where the audience hung on his every hyperlinked word Tuesday night. At the end of his speech, he asked everyone to turn on their cell phones and hold them up — a scintillating landscape of brilliances, all connected to the Web he invented.
In a press conference afterwards, I asked Berners-Lee if he’d anticipated that so many people would be online.
“There was no upper bound” to the design of the Web. But with only 20 percent of humanity online, there’s plenty of room to grow.
Does that mean he wants everyone to be on the Web?
“We’re not going to force people to be online, but they should have access to the Web, or have someone helping them who uses the Web for them.”
Berners-Lee seems to have softened his view of Facebook. Last November, he talked about his concern that Facebook and other closed-off social networks could fragment the Web. But just last week, the W3C announced that Facebook had become a member. And now Berners-Lee seems to support the idea that Facebook might be a foundational element for new Web applications.
“When people like Vint Cerf designed the Internet, they had no idea about the World Wide Web,” said Berners-Lee in response to a question about the growing role of Twitter and Facebook. “But it was a very solid foundation, and I could build the Web on top of it. The Web should be a solid foundation, too. In their own way, they’re making those systems so humanity can get connected. I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg say that.”
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One person building an essential service on top of Twitter is Shefaly Yogendra, a London-based consultant who’s helping users in India track power outages in the subcontinent. “Summer in India brings not only juicy mangoes but also the prospect of frequent planned and unplanned power cuts,” shewrites. As resilient and fault-resistant as Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is, it still needs electricity to run. She and Ajay Kumar created a website, Power Cuts in India, which tracks complaints on Twitter with the hashtag #powercutsindia. In the first 24 hours, the site reached 98,000 people. (Hat tip to Twitter’s Jenna Sampson, who highlighted the effort.)
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While Berners-Lee has not made much money off his invention, preferring to count his profit in impact on humanity, he has fueled countless billionaires. The latest is the aforementioned Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, who is now worth an estimated $1.6 billion.
If Berners-Lee is the father of the Web, then Hoffman deserves credit as one of the parents of social networking. He started a company, SocialNet, in the industry’s nascent days, and has been involved as an angel investor with countless other social startups from Friendster on. He and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus jointly own a key patent on social networking they purchased in 2003.
What will Hoffman do with his riches? I’m sure he’s got plenty of ideas. But I have two modest suggestions.
First, take a trip to Bilbao. Seriously, it’s gorgeous.
And then drop some money on a grant to the W3C to develop ways to keep mobile apps and social networks part of the free and open Web. It’s the least he can do for the Webfather.
