"Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."This social media technology is amazing and is eagerly anticipated by many. Google is in the process of launching Google Wave as I post this blog. You can learn about Google Wave at the Google Wave Preview website, but it's pretty technical. I recommend the condensed 8 minute Google Wave Overview.
It is said that "God created language to divide the humans so that they could not work together to build a tower to heaven".
Using Google Wave, and a software robot called "Rosie" you can actually converse over the Internet with someone that speaks another language in real-time. This comes pretty close to what Douglas Adams describes in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Stick a Babel fish in your ear and understand any language.
How will this change the world? Will the world get smaller still? Will Americans communicate directly with Iranians? Will the French reach past their language? Will Google Wave temper our destructive nationalistic tendencies?I'm not so much hopeful that we will build a tower to heaven, but a bridge to understand our fellow human across our planet.
One can only hope.
Also, check out Byki.com. It's is a powerful and personalized language-learning system. You can view a real-time Twitter feed of tweets containing the new vocabulary word in question to see how real people are using the language. The global nature of Twitter means that people are constantly tweeting in many languages; Byki taps into the Twittersphere to compile the largest possible vocabulary usage list.
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