(Un) Wired for Reality

Landline Voice is declining at 10% per year.  Not 3%.  Not 5%.  10%.

If the existence of Twitter and Facebook at their current size (Facebook at 400M Users?) point to anything,  Humans are becoming more transactional, and better at handling store and forward "conversations".

As an old believer in the value and intimacy of interpersonal voice conversations, I'm starting to feel a little superfluous.  ( I'm not really worried - I expect that wireless minutes more than make up for loss of land-line minutes)

But this begs a question - how do the real-time interpersonal and the broadcast transactional mix ?  Both have communities.  Both communicate intimate thoughts and feelings, and in both cases occasionally create speakers remorse.  Are they two sides of the same coin, or different currencies ?

If forced to take a side in ignorance I would have chosen that they would mix well.  I might (gasp) be wrong.  Perhaps mixed modalities don't always mix.

I went looking apps on Facebook (more than 50,000 apps) that would enhance my communications capabilities with other facebook users, and with other humans.  If there were lots of apps, or some really well used ones, that facilitated real-time interpersonal voice communication, that would indicate that the modalities mix.  What did I find you ask?  My search was not comprehensive, but after trying long enough to get discouraged I had only discovered 20 apps, where the most popular was charting less than 1500 usages a month.  Pretty anemic for a community of 400M users.

ok - keep lookin'.

I found a  voice app for gamers toggles in at over 4000 usages a month.  Still not great, but at least a blip.  Note, however, that this is voice as a part of another app.  This isn't voice.  This is just a sideline.  The core business of gamer voice supported by this application's creator is more than 2B minutes a month.  The Facebook app is a drop in the bucket.

So what?    The facts are the facts.   Land-line voice is on its last legs.  Social Networking tools will not replace the real-time interpersonal voice experience: the modalities don't mix.  All other conclusions are left as an exercise to the communicator.

What is Google Wave's FFT ?

If I recall my college Physics courses at all (which I really don't) a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) amounted to a decomposition of a complex waveform by representing it as a series of parameters that each represented a simple (Square?) wave.

So what is Google Wave's FFT?   What constituent parts does it decompose into?

Another way of asking the question might be to exploit the parable of the blind men and the elephant.  You know the one.  It's the story where 3 different wise men determine an elephant to be different things, because they can each only see part of the critter.  They each individually represent the component of the decomposition that they perceive as the entire nature of the elephant.

So on to further thoughts on Googles, Elephants, Waves, FFTs and (of course) communications.


We can, like, start speaking metaphorically, like, what is wave like?  (I'm practicing to become a, like, teenager).

• Wave is like IM, hmmm, no, more like email, well, not email, perhaps threaded email.  This train of observation is like grasping the elephant's tail.  Certainly the observation is correct, but i'm like, missing so much of the picture.  Lets try again.
• Wave is like a Wiki.  Again - correct, but a little incomplete. Combining two correct interpretations that are as disparate as WIKI and Webmail certainly leaves a lot of room for interpretation.  Perhaps the 3rd time will be lucky.
• Wave is like a Twitter stream.  Oh sure.  Climb on the bandwagon, dude (he mutters to himself). Certainly watching some of the usage of wave  it appears that this modality of use is something that meshes well with the user population.  Again we suffer the dissonance of inequality.  Wiki != Webmail != Feed.
• Gadgets and Bots make it like sort of like a Facebook, or potentially like an application in a cloud-based  SaaS offer.
• Of course it is a Social Networking site / tool / whatever, ...
• and Google has just proven that it is not a Buzz (for that is something different).

The essence of my point is that 1) everybody thinks of it in existing terms, which blinds us somewhat, and 2)  we don't really know what it is yet - usage will change it.  Just like Twitter morphs and evolves, so will Wave, and so will our use.

So if it is hard to understand, and hard to determine how to use it, or what it is for, then is it significant?  I would not want to bet the farm, but I will note that Wave is real-time, and so are most people that i know.  It is also supported by a large and patient company - it will have chance to grow (or die a slow death).

I await the mobile and native clients (perhaps embedded in Chrome OS), and enough of my community becoming users, in order to make it useful.  Time will tell, but I certainly will not bet against it.