An Internet-Inside-The-Internet.

So many analogies, but the one that I keep coming back to is the dog in the Men In Black movie who had a necklace with an ornament that contained a galaxy as big and diverse as the one we're in now.

Anyway, what happens when a developer community comes to life for a platform that's deeply nested inside a corporate silo? They can only communicate to the outside world through the constraints of the silo. But inside the silo, perhaps there's freedom! An Internet tries to boot up.

In early days of Twitter, like a lot of people, I was excited at the possibility of a centralized message router that we could all openly build apps on. But I also thought it would have been a good idea for Twitter to have an internal macro language, like Lotus 1-2-3 did, or dBASE or emacs, or Unix or really any good rich data or text environment. If Twitter was going to be the router, why not put some logic inside the router as well as around it.

A rich Internet inside the Internet might have booted up in there.

I think the public folder of our Dropboxes has the potential to be an Internet-Inside-The-Internet as well.

As does our persistent World Outline project.

And blorking.

 4/21/2011; 3:05:33 PM.   .

Here's a project I'd love to see come into existence, asap.

A plain-but-elegant jQueryish shell for a Twitter-like environment.

Think of it as a skin for a service that doesn't yet exist.

If this were out there then all I'd have to provide is the JSONP and some XML for the user interface elements. All the interaction would be out of my hands. This would be a very powerful interface, because while we may need lots of approaches to that form of data, we don't need lots of different user interfaces. Having a common UI here is just as important as having one on the desktop.

I would be a user of this, both at a developer-user and as a editorial-user.

 4/21/2011; 12:48:33 AM.   .