Technology to help you compose inane chatter

Rob Walker writes in the New York Times about Plinky, a tool to help you think of stuff to write online. Heaven forbid you let your tweet stream (or your Wave) go silent while you think of something worthwhile to say. That's for old people!

Excerpt:

It has never been easier to express yourself in public. Whatever you might want to say, the online tools to let you say it to a (theoretically) worldwide audience are innumerable. Say it long, say it short, say what you want, when you want and how often you want. As the title of a forthcoming book about blog culture puts it: “Say Everything.” You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express?

Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you. Plinky.com, which officially went online in January, exists specifically to offer what it calls prompts, meant to inspire interesting thoughts to share with the world.

[...]

Thus Plinky’s daily prompts: Which movie’s characters would you befriend in real life? What will you do when the zombies come? Who would win a fight between a bear and a shark? Plinky users responded to that last question by the hundreds. A prompt about songs for a road trip got more than 2,000 replies, making it the most popular query to date. The intentionally innocuous nature of the prompts makes them reminiscent of canned cocktail-party conversation starters. The difference is that while a tongue-tied party guest can at least try to cultivate an air of brooding mystery that might lead someone else to start the conversation, the Internet wallflower is totally invisible. Chime in, or you’re forgotten. Thus a Plinky slogan: “Hey, didn’t you use to have a blog?” Poignant.

Link: Say What? (I like the accompanying comic too)

I bet some Google engineers are already working (in their 20% time) to add similar semi-automated chatter features into Wave so your conversations can be self generating. Call it Standing Wave (tm).

I hope to write more about Google Wave later... I'm not sure yet what I think of it. I watched part of the presentation and it looks impressive, but I'm not convinced it's necessary. It's telling for me that their goal was simply to create "what email would look like if it were invented today." That seems odd to me (but typically Google).

Update: Just noticed that Scott Rosenberg (author of the above mentioned book about blogs) posted a nice analysis of Wave at his site: Do you prefer Google Wave's swirl or a clean river?