No, I don’t have a Google Wave invite yet. Yes, I’m bitter. But Scoble has already pronounced it a loser, so there’s no need to try it out now, right?

News from the Social Media Vortex

–GoogleWaveGoogleWaveGoogleWave – the technosphere can talk of nothing else this week. While every lame surfing/nautical pun imaginable is being employed by bloggers, the actual merits of the technology remain to be seen. A more interesting development is the emergence of the Wave spammer/blackmailer/link-whorer, individuals who dangled invites to the service in exchange for endless retweets and follows on Twitter. And yes, I’ll admit to participating in one. (@AaronNeale, I’m still waiting.) If anyone would like to give me an invite, I’ll say something nice about you in The Vortex next week.

God, I’ve resorted to begging. I hope you’re all happy.

–Let’s get philosophical, shall we? Joel Postman had an excellent piece a couple of weeks ago on Social Media Today, in which he applies the thoughts of Marshall McLuhan, Socrates, and Einstein, among others, to social media. This would make a fascinating book; something along the lines of The Simpsons and Philosophy. And yes, I own that.

–So this is pretty funny. What happens when celebrities immerse themselves in a technology they don’t completely understand? Justine Bateman, that’s what. Seems that our beloved Mallory didn’t catch on to a new re-tweeting feature in Twitter and hurled expletives in response. After a similar incident with her Tumblr account, you’d think she would hire someone to explain this Interwebs thing to her.

Apps on the Radar

–Not an app, per se, but something I will be purchasing immediately. Duracell has an instant charger for any USB-compatible device that juices up your battery-sucking iPhone on the go. And it’s only $20.

–Are you on Aardvark yet? I’ve been using this nifty little question-and-answer service for months and love it. Now that they’ve made an iPhone app, you have no excuse.

–News junkies should check out this Wired post on news apps that personalize the news for you. Twitter Times seems especially interesting.

Tweet of the Week

…and a fun new ID to follow. @Artwiculate holds a daily contest in which followers create the best tweet using a given word. Yesterday’s winner, for the use of ‘oeuvre,’ was @routermonkey who said, “After mastering french, bi-fold and dutch doors, the carpenter was proud to add louvered to his oeuvre.”

But the tweet of the week goes to @novaspivack, in a perfect illustration of why I love semantics geeks:

Question … has anyone computed all valid English sentences of 140 characters? How many are there.. ballpark…?

Let me get right back to you on that one, Nova.