Rumors and dodo birds

Rumor says that in 1598 when Portuguese sailors landed on the island of Mauritius they discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo, and being hungry they promptly ate the poor creatures into extinction. The piteous dodo is today associated with being a big, dumb, sloth like galumph. This demeaning talk has ruined the reputation of a perfectly fine and stately, albeit very dead, bird. But the enticing lies about this unfortunate bird have continued to this day. Reality is that it is doubtful that the bird was eaten into extinction because all historical reports indicate that they tasted like crap. The birds lived in isolation due to their island location and had no contact with humanity, so the dodo greeted their first visitors with a wide-eyed gullible innocence. The sailors thought the big lumbering birds were stupid, not understanding the truth; the birds simply lacked any fear of the newcomers and had no experience with predators. The sailors named the bird "dodo" (meaning a simpleton in the Portuguese tongue). Thousands of the dodo were killed by their human visitors, mostly for their feathers, and those that survived man had to face human introduced animals. Things went from shallow to deep doo doo for the dodo when domesticated dogs and pigs soon became feral. By the year 1681, the last dodo had died, and we were left with only feathers, bones and a bad taste in our mouths.


The dodo bird is a lot like facebook. It is new and different and we might well not understand everything about it, but killing it off before we get the chance to fully investigate it would be as foolhardy as mankind infecting the dodo's environment with our ignorance. The magnitude of possibilities for facebook and other social networking sites are incalculable. Even though man wiped out the dodo in less than one hundred years, its legacy lives on in fairy tales (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), in the coat of arms of Mauritius, modern novels (J.K. Rowling and Jasper Fforde) and is even the title of a Dave Matthews song. Who is to say what the legacy of social networking will be? No one can guess. Instead of reaching a few hundred people each day we can touch millions of lives through a new social tool. What a hoot! How could we turn that opportunity down?