From a great interview with Ray Ozzie from Microsoft waxing philosophical about the Google Wave era technologies.

RAY OZZIE: I think the answer is yes, it’s important and there are a lot of very interesting things. I think we don’t really know yet which ones are going to be sustainable killer app type usages versus not. It’s really hard to scale things that are at that real time level, and I frankly don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what real time means.

When you’re Tweeting only once every, I don’t know, how often do you think the speediest people who Twitter are doing it over the course of their waking hours, if you averaged it out, once every —

STEVE GILLMOR: Well, noisy — Scoble is 100 a day.

RAY OZZIE: Is it 100? Okay. But that’s still not much in the grand scheme of things if you think of how many seconds he’s awake per day. It’s still only once every N seconds.

What if your devices were Tweeting on your behalf to serve you? What if your phone, your car, your — I don’t know your glasses, but different things in your life were posting informational updates that went to services that were acting on your behalf? It’s a perfectly reasonable, realistic thing that could happen if you had an infrastructure that was a message switching infrastructure in real time. It’s a logical direction that things would go.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been talking about auto-Twitter for months now.

STEVE GILLMOR: So, your concern about the overwhelming fire hose aspect of this that is just difficult to scale up to that kind of —

RAY OZZIE: Well, there’s a technological aspect and a human aspect. From a technological aspect it’s just a hard computer science problem like some of the Azure things that we’re doing or some of the things that Google has had to cope with in high scale systems. Anybody who has built a really high scale system — Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger — whenever you’re dealing with half a billion users, there are some interesting scale issues. And that’s simple point to point. If you take it end to end, it’s just even more.

But beyond the technological scale issues, the reason I was getting at the unified notifier concept is because I think as humans we have these issues. And certain of the events, certain classes of the events we want to treat, as Dave says, like a river where you don’t really care if you miss something, you know. It’s where you’re not trying to keep up every little thing. It’s maybe it’s an amusement, maybe it’s just a background activity.

Some types of events you just want to see them. You just don’t want to miss even a single one in this big flood of notifications. And so we just need better tools.

Our tools will become more and more responsible for maintaining our social networks, and trading between background and foreground attention. Our machines are using us.