Not on the rug, man.

The two big product launches of the past month illustrate two very different tubes diverging in the techno-woods. With the mammoth roll-out of the iPad, Apple once again has tried to pull Athena right out of Zeus’s head fully formed.  To paraphrase Fake Steve “Here you go, frigtards.  Try not to break it.”  It is interesting that one of the big communication leaps involving the iPod, podcasting, happened almost despite Apple. Sure, the app store has provided a platform for innovation, but it is notoriously restrictive. It seems like Little Steven wants to tell us exactly what the iPad will do. Truth is, he doesn’t know yet.

On the other hand, we have Google. I used to think Google knew exactly what they were doing. With the launch of Buzz, they have clearly shown their nuts. At the very best, they are throwing spaghetti at the wall. But oh those noodles. Gmail and Gtalk are great products. I have a gay crush on GoogleDocs (assuming they are male.)  With due respect to my beloved WordPress, Blogger is STRONG y’all. Picassa is very nifty. And Orkut is very popular in Sau Palo. If Buzz (dumb name, but not iPad dumb) can bring those pieces together, Google will have jumped way out in front of Facebook to become the operating system of Internet 2.0.  That is, if anybody can figure out what to do with Buzz.

As the constant evolution of the Facebook interface shows us, the standard for how we use Internet 2.0 (I know, that’s soooooo 2006) is not set.  Facebookers scream like children every time the site undergoes an overhaul because they assume that the standard is being changed.  But there is no standard.  Check out this video of Facebook’s chief designer explaining the new look and feel. Check out his American Eagle shirt.  Check out that he’s maybe 25.  Nothing against 25 year olds, but if they are the ones in charge of the operating system, you can expect things to evolve dramatically.  When Bill Gates was 25, the PC standard was the Disk Operating System.  Remember DOS?  Badass, right?  Why’d they ever change that little ruby?

Ok, so point made.  We are not evolved; we are evolving as far as the interweb goes.  The original question was how we are to proceed.  Steve Jobs would have us locked down into iPhone OS and the unwavering belief that he is smarter so we should be quiet now.  The Google guys (who are 36, by the way, not so old at all if you ask me) are trying to get us to do the heavy lifting for them — or else they are really just stumbling around in the dark.  The rest of us, including Marky Mark and the Zuckerbunch, are holding on for dear life until the goddamn spinning stops.  What we need is something to really tie the room together.