Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry:

BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?”

That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford’s Locus Bayou office over the past two years, had the code name Old Yeller. That’s the Arkansas old time tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the skunk hunting trails and learn the world anew.

lifted and parodized from O’Reilley Radar and done so only in fun and respect from that Web 2.0 coiner

Ford Waves are available only by a secret invite down to the shed from your cousin Earl or his brother Earl.

Yes, I am mocking Google Wave, but I think Chris Lott went and Ruimated my sentiments exactly in his post today Google Wave Hype or Hope?

I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It’s probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools—including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don’t buy, Google’s positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it’s simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I’ve yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost.

[Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like “how can we use Google Wave in education?” It’s not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very “geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy” that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?]

Like Chris, I am trying to do some wave attempts but am not feeling any thing close to shine.

But then again, I lack the shrewd investigate prowess of our leading spotlight of technology

and I cant wait to be proven wrong. But you should see how fast a ride that Ford Wave really is!

My not so accurate radar is being tickled by some recent emerging technologies that some Big Shot may place as the next incremental digit following “Web”. Submitted for your approval, Mr Serling:

• A lot of talk of “real time search”
• The whole crazy growth of Twitter, Facebook, etc — built on answering the deep philosophical question– what are you doing NOW?
• Waiting for the Google Wave to land on shore — more promise of the web being not a pile of linked documents but a networked of linked flowing communications.

One more today- I caught Joss Winn’s tweet about WordPress.com’s new experiment in Real Time Blogs:

At im.wordpress.com we have been experimenting with instant delivery of blog posts and comments. Now you can subscribe to WordPress.com blogs in your Jabber IM client and receive posts and comments the instant they are published. It is also possible to post to blogs from the chat client. In time we plan to add these real-time features to web pages. Soon the conversations on blogs will be as fast as chat rooms.

I’m still fuzzy on what all this means– but it feels like a Wave like layer where two way communication can happen between a blog (or its comments) and for now, a simple chat client, but eventually I guess other sysems.

I was able in a few minutes to set up my iChat client to communicate via Jabber to the im.wordpress.com server. For now, you can use it to communicate with a WordPress.com site, so I set it to subscribe to my CogDpgPhotoBlog http://cogdog.wordpress.com/ as well as comments.

Nothing happened.

Of course, because there were no changes.

But later today, when I posted a new photo to this blog from Twitter, immediately I got an IM:

I’m still trying to grasp how this might be used, but this is not the end functionality– it is showing the basic simple communication channel (chat) to send notifications as well as commands back that I can issue.

There seems to be a lot of “real-time” stuff percolating out there.

Our flags do it in the breeze

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ladybugbkt

It can be exciting!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by (nz)dave

It is a sign of old fashioned social networking

cc licensed flickr photo shared by striatic

It defines how information moves through media

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mdezemery

That’s all I know right now, or at least all that is not speculation.