It’s 2010. Where’s My Internet Dashboard?

With every­one debat­ing whether email is being dis­placed by social media, I find myself return­ing to a thought I’ve been toss­ing about for a while. Why isn’t there a sin­gle, web based dash­board for all my internet-​based com­mu­ni­ca­tion? It should act both as an aggre­ga­tor and as a mes­sag­ing cen­tre– a sin­gu­lar launch-​point from which I can see the lat­est news and quickly com­pose mes­sages that can be sent to any of my con­nected plat­forms: email, twit­ter, blog post, what­ever. #

I actu­ally expected this to hap­pen quite a while ago, and I know that there have been some attempts to pull it off, includ­ing Google’s increas­ing suite of apps (and the poorly exec­tuted iGoogle). I also had an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about this on Twitter a few weeks ago, sug­gest­ing that part of Facebook’s suc­cess has to do with the dash­board. You access news, mes­sages, shared links, pho­tos and sta­tus updates from one con­ve­nient inter­face. #

I’m no pro­gram­mer, or I’d have built this by now. Despite that, I can tell you what would be required of such a thing if it’s to work: #

Data needs to live both on my com­puter and in the cloud.

This dash­board of mine should live on a mini server on my com­puter, syn­chro­niz­ing with the cloud when­ever changes hap­pen. My data needs to be portable, it needs to be acces­si­ble any­where, and I need to be able to own it. This means my lit­tle server would syn­chro­nize with servers “out there.” That way, I can still access the ser­vice through mobile devices and library com­put­ers, and every­thing will still be stored locally on my own com­puter. #

Peer to Peer Connections

My con­tact info should exist as my iden­tity on my per­sonal server and when I change any­thing, it should push those changes to my “friends” or what­ever you want to call peo­ple I’ve allowed to have access. This will always go directly to their per­sonal servers, when pos­si­ble, or through the cloud when needed. For larger files, I should be able to “post” them via a secure bit tor­rent feed. That way, every­one in my net­work shares the load of the file. Of course, I should be able to restrict auto­matic down­load of such files to a size limit, much like I do with my SMTP client. #

River of News and Single Composition Interface

The heart of the dash­board will be a river of news, but fil­ter­able in a vari­ety of ways, threaded and com­bin­ing incom­ing mes­sages from all my ser­vices, includ­ing email. A sin­gle inter­face will let me send email, post to my blog or update my sta­tus. It will default to what­ever mode I’m respond­ing to (if it’s a response), but I can select whichever ser­vices I want to push to. #

A Public Face

This would look some­thing like ClaimID, with an OpenID cer­tifi­cate built in and a but­ton allow­ing peo­ple to request access. #

I think the ingre­di­ents are all out there, just some­one more clever than me needs to hook it all up. #

What do you think? Can it be done? What else does this dash­board need? #