the Onda

After yesterday's rant about creating parallel infrastructures for messaging, I was amused to read Scott Karp's blog post on the "inefficiencies" of Web 2.0 where he argues that plugging your Twitter stream into Facebook and then consuming both it and the Facebook feed in Google Reader can get annoying.

Absolutely true.

However, parallel messaging infrastructures aside, Scott is missing the point. The cool thing is that we can do these things at all.

Find any three year-old who has discovered Legos and watch him go to town snapping stuff together. For the two years, the creations that he will assemble will look like molten piles of plastic growing haphazardly every which way, really amounting to nothing more than the sheer joy of knowing that force and concentration work magic with Lego pieces. This is exactly where we are with RSS and ATOM feeds and all of the hidden readers that can consume them (Facebook, Jaiku, Google Gadgets, Yahoo Pipes, etc.).

But keep watching that three year-old as he turns into a five year-old and you'll see something really amazing start to happen. The jumbles become ships, airplanes, cars. The haphazard construction gives way to a careful understanding of where a 1x2 makes all the difference and where a right angle join can turn a car into a rocket. And in the best of cases, these new found skills find ways to surprise even the very designers of the kits the respective pieces belong to.

When it comes to syndicating and remixing content and web application functionality, I think we're just about to turn that five-year old corner. We're really about to see the true promise of web services delivered— on a consumer platform and mostly by "user programmers" remixing feeds and plugging things together. And a little redundancy is a small price to pay for that.

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