Some visionary rambling

I’d like to have a virtual office, with online functionality to replicate ways of interaction from the real world, i.e. blogs and messageboards, yammering etc., but in terms that makes it intuitive for my old and technology-suspicious coworkers. Google Wave will probably be the service to save us from the horrible impracticalities of email-based office work, but that’s mostly about communication and collaboration. The stuff that goes on in meeting rooms. I want to have a home and an office as well. Something else than just another url. I would like the web to be redesigned in some way, to allow me — as a legal entity — to have a virtual place to call my own. In this place, I can build a home, an office, another office perhaps (for my future freelancing career), a study desk etc. Call these the aspects of me as a virtual entity. Visit my office aspect at an address that looks something like this: [Gorm > Office no. 1], or alternatively, you can find the identical place via my workplace: [Super Secret Workplace > Dept. of Supersecrecy > Gorm's Office].

All legal entities can have virtual locations. Indeed, I think they should have one reserved for them. Every individual, firm, government etc. should have reserved a virtual place with a unique address. First time visit by a proprietor of such a virtual place is greeted by a wizard with butler-like demeanor that explains and suggests ways to use the features available. Social networking stuff, virtual homemaking stuff, etc. The new Opera Unite has perhaps some attractive features in this regard. Your workplace can put requirements on your virtual office — for instance, it might be obligatory to have displayed a yammer gadget in your “office entrance” (how much better than “the front page of your personal office website” is this?).

It all has to be very rationally as well as intuitively designed, and completely void of the desperately social focus that a lot of social networking sites has. I have some ideas about the details, but you’re not that interested, and I have no way of realizing any of this anyway.

Addendum: I’d like to be able to design a map-like tool as an interface to my virtual world. Something vaguely resembling the Sims, where I can place my virtual home, my virtual office etc., and also my neighborhood — friends, colleagues, games I like to play, trusted newspapers I like to read etc. Imagine all of this placed on one big map with great zoom functionality (I guess this will be possible with html 5). At a distance, evertything is reduced to something diagrammatical: Icons and lines signifying relations, groups etc. But zoom in, and you get more details. Zoom all the way in, and you materialize into an avatar that shows your presence, and what you’re doing. You can talk to people, leave a note if noone’s there, search the place (e.g. your office) or “knock on the door”, which is something that pings the owner whereever he or she might be.

Model for zoom functionality: The game Sins of a Solar Empire.