Da Vinci lived between 1452 and 1519, the Wright Brothers achieved flight in 1903. Now for those who are not aware Da Vinci had many thoughts and ideas for devices that would loft man into the sky. Some of those ideas actually would have worked and maybe the technology or more importantly, the belief that it would really work were not there. So more than 300 hundred years later the Wright Brothers flew off a sand dune at Kitty Hawk.
If you are reading this and don’t know what Google Wave is, well you are lost (read: your not from around here, are you?) and you need to Google it, or unplug your computer and return it to the manufacturer.
I bring this up because of Google Wave. In the ‘internet, connected, 2.0, new age, and every other freaking buzzword’ age we have seen some pretty amazing things. Email, texting, wikis, social networking, flicker, cell phones that can fit in your ear, phone calls over the internet, video conferencing and Twitter (yes, even Twitter defies logic, but it works for what it is so please stop hating, please). But what happens when you bring it all together at one time? Overwhelming happens. If your reading this blog it is only because of one of two things. One, you personally know me. Or two, your techaligious (you live, breath, and geek out over everything tech). Now taking those two points into account, how many other people do you know that fall out of those two categories? Well, pretty much a vast majority of the world.
Google Wave is like applying jumper cables to your car and then connecting them to a nuclear reactor. The flux capacitor looks like a fart in the wind compared to the energy and power of the afore mentioned combination. Yet this is what Google Wave is. It takes all of the technologies we understand in their single space and then mashes them together. Without warning you are now texting, emailing, teleconferncing, and twittering at once. You are inviting people into the fold midstream, or full stream. It’s like trying to sip a drink of water from a fire hydrant, or catching a breath of air from a tornado. You’ll get what you need, but you can’t control how much of what you get versus what you can handle?
There is also another point to look at when looking at Wave. MOBILE! Mobile is growing like crazy, and there is one fact that people don’t consider, literacy… There are more than 1 billion illiterate people in the world (BTW – it took me 20 seconds to get literate spelled correctly), 98 percent of them are in developing nations. But what is in developing nations is cell phones, not laptops. But I digress, this has nothing to do with the topic at hand (but will someday lead into another rant). Wave will not work on mobile in it’s current incarnation. Just my thought. But back to the story at hand…
Lars and Jens Rasmussen have built the Tardis, the Flux Capacitor, the freaking Master Blaster! It’s what you get when Sasha Grey meats the Death Star, an unbelievably sexy, awe inspiring, and possibly destructive force that you aren’t going to introduce to your mom. Are we ready for this? Can we comprehend and be able to use this gift? Can we harness the power? Who gives a shit, let’s go for it. Da Vinci was ahead of the Wright Brothers by centuries but it didn’t catch on. Lucky for us the wired world moves centuries in a few years.
Posted: 30th October 2009
