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If you could turn the whole web into a vibrant, engaged, participatory community and do it all on your platform, then suddenly you're rivaling Facebook. That's a $100B business right there.

It's just that annotations, by themselves, fail to do that. Their VCs must've been betting either on some new killer feature that would come out, or that users would react to the existing annotation product differently than they did. For a VC, though, "could rival Facebook" is often more important than "has a small chance of doing so".




Betting that the rapid growth and dominance in rap could be reproduced across other verticals.

And that annotations could eventually be the successor to eg Disqus across the web, as well a new type of social network.

I think the world's information would be so much richer if it had played out. I'm still bullish on annotation tools for empowering knowledge.




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