Padd Solutions

Just watched this presentation on Google Wave, a product Mountain View will launch later this year that's already in developer preview. Wave's headline is:

"What would it look like if email were designed, from scratch, today?"

In slightly more detail, and hopefully rendered in such a way that my parents could understand it, is this. A wave will be a "thing" on the internet that

a) will subsume (if you want) the activity you now call email

b) will also subsume instant-messaging or SMS-length communications (text-messages) (again, if you want it to do so)

c) will fold-in document editing of any kind (.doc, presentation, etc.)

d) will both fold-in and shoot out the content of your or anyone's blog

e) will transplant the collaborative (and argumentative) temperament of Message Boards or "Forums"

f) and more

all into a benevolent Frankenstein's monster of a program. But wait: monster isn't the word, because a wave will (to the person coding it) be no more clunky or heavy than your average Gmail missive. And to the user, it won't look any different from Gmail at that.

***

Of the deck's 1:20 runtime, I got to about fifty minutes. I mean, rationally, this is goi

ng to be a sea change for the internet. (On a higher level, what is it about these people that all they do is crank out Sea Changes like they were quarter-inch screws in a Chinese factory?) 

But emotionally, sitting there watching this my heart was pounding, and not out of excitement. Or maybe, like, 50% excitement. The other half was dread, which gave way to anxiety and perspiration and elevated heartbeat. 

I suddenly felt alone, like one of those TV vignettes (it can be found in a plethora of shows) wherein the protagonist finds himself the only one left on Earth while he watches all of humanity blast off in art-deco-looking rocket ships to other, better, more hopeful worlds. 

Here's the rub: if most of the time I feel like I'm nowhere close to being a fully realized individual member of my species, an AMR who knows himself as fully as can be expected (and I'm improving on this in leaps and bounds; see levees breaking in an older post), how in God's name can I raise my hand like the teacher's pet and go "Oooo, oooo, pick me for Google Waves!"???

I imagine this feeling is not unlike the feeling older folks got when the Internet came crashing, bull-like, into the china-shops of their lives in the mid nineties. The feeling some old lawyer got when some young lawyer, fresh outta 3L, asked him if he could send him an "email" about xyz after the deposition in the fall of 1994. Yeah, you know it: it's dread. That's the feeling. That hint you get that soon you'll be irrelevant no matter how hard you try to pick up the slack.

So it's dread I felt just half an hour ago knowing I should instead be very excited for Google Waves. (And again, part of me is.)  There sat I, speaker of five languages and potential speaker of any number more, being told that here's this little gadget (it's always little) that will in effect make learning a language (and by extension teaching it) largely irrelevant because a Google Wave will be able to translate the native tongue of any wave-collaborator on the fly using a language database so large that it was culled from the entire internet. I haven't even chosen a career, and there goes my one absolutely unassailable, bulletproof skill on my CV. All because of an applet (note the -let, viz. little, no skin off my back) named "Spelly."