Thanks to Matt for the heads up on this story (I don’t watch Good Morning, America). It is a remarkable social experiment — turning a paperclip into a house through barter — and could probably be deemed a success just by evolving to a size that attracted the attention of a Hollywood actor.
I’ve had crazy ideas like that before, but I seldom stick with things enough to see them to fruition. Very product-oriented, at least until I got to the School of Informatics. This isn’t on the same level, but I do feel pretty good about where 3rdParty.org is going. My pal Jeff and I started this back in 1998. I’ve had a long period of dormancy after installing an Ultimate Bulletin Board back in 2000, contributing little as I went to work and then school. But there’s nothing like a year-long capstone to give one an excuse to jump back in.
For the past couple weeks, I have been in the process of integrating four open source applications — phpBB, MediaWiki, WordPress and PHPChat. It’s still a hack job, but the logins are are synchronized now, and the all-too-familiar template design is universal. I just worked with Jeff to throw the switch today and register a change in domain name servers, so the world should start seeing that work anytime now …
Maybe Corbin Bernsen will give me a year’s rent soon.