cheesebikini?

Jane McGonigal excels at such a deep and broad variety of things that I really should be jealous of her. And I try. But she’s so thoughtful and innovative and fun to be around that I just can’t keep the envy alive.

A year ago I invited her to a party at my house. She couldn’t make it because she was out of town. She apologized profusely, and to make it up she arranged for a cadre of performer friends to come over and carry out a full-on rock opera involving simulated Internet chat rooms and blue topless singing aliens.

You’ll be sorry if you miss Jane’s “Graveyard Games” this Saturday in Colma, the home of San Francisco’s dead. Details here. (You’re not allowed to bury people in San Francisco. Colma is a bizarre suburb south of the city that’s made up largely of cemeteries housing countless deceased San Franciscans.)

Amidst all the buzz about the launch of Ning.com (Marc Andreesen’s “24 Hour Laundry” project), Jen King points out that this all sounds like the startup she worked for back in 1999, Devtop. Apparently they were all Web 2.14 back when the rest of the world was still on Web 1.145. Give or take a few digits.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– June 26, 2000 — Desktop.com (www.desktop.com), the first integrated and personalized Internet desktop platform, today introduced Devtop (www.devtop.com), the first open, integrated platform for building, deploying, and distributing Web-based applications. Devtop reduces development time, minimizes cost, enables enriched functionality, and offers broader distribution for Web application providers everywhere.

Devtop provides the infrastructure, content, technology, and other resources needed to build Web-based applications. The service includes an Application Programming Interface (API) and corresponding documentation to access databases and servers, 25MB free storage, and content such as news headlines, sports scores, and stock quotes. Devtop’s free hosting, 24×7 monitoring site management, and reporting minimize the time, money and technical expertise required to deploy an application.

Full press release

Dav Yaginuma (formerly Coleman) has been writing about this concept as well, calling it the “blank white server.”