Erik sent me Stevey's Google Platforms Rant repost on news.ycombinator.com Subject: I'm glad you get this and that's how you designed 6d. My short gut response was, "well of course", and I was about to hit send, but something compelled me to reafirm why I had that gut response. Here's my reply to the message, after Erik's suggestion to post it.

It's exactly how 6d is designed. 6d is a platform. Blog, Address Book, Media Manager, etc., they are all apps built with the platform. As a matter of fact, I've taken the idea of a platform even further by mimicking and staying close to the design decisions of the HTTP protocol and the web. Every resource is uniquely identifiable and can stand alone, meaning you can call any resource by itself. You don't have to make a GET call to addressbook before you make a POST call to it. It's stateless just like HTTP, which makes it scalable. It's revolutionary to design a web app like this because I have yet to meet someone who thinks it can be done. The ones i have spoken with about this still believe that you have to build a separate admin interface because you can't "mix" the two. But that just tells me that they don't get it. They don't see the app as a platform first.

After reading this to make sure I didn't misspell anything or use grammar that, to my knowledge, is incorrect, I didn't like where the last statement stopped because what I mean is that the app is the platform. And everything else is built with it (or on top of it, depending on your preference). I purposefully chose to design the app as a RESTful application. It's not just an acronym to me. It's a design, an architecture, a philosophy, and constraints. There's so much more to building a RESTful application than just pretty URLs and JSON. You're constrained by the HTTP methods and the idea that everything is a resource that the eventual design is simple, stateless and flexible. Just think about this, the same URL that you used to request this post, represented as HTML, can be modified by adding ".json" to the end of it to get it represented as JSON instead. Think how powerful that becomes when you want to make a web app that makes AJAX requests? It uses the same URLs as the web site does but with different file types (JSON, XML, HTML, etc.). Come on! That's cool!

I just got through chatting with someone about 6d and doing so, always reminds me that it's hard to communicate your vision to someone else. This post is just a reiteration of what 6d will do.

6d will be a blog, public profile, an address book and a messaging center. What you do with all that is up to you. And the possibilities are endless. For example, having a blog allows you to share thoughts, photos, ideas, articles, videos, links, etc. publicly. That's already being done, especially with Wordpress. Doing so tells Google and any other search engine that crawls your site what you're interested in, what you want to be associated with. This is what we mean when we say "online identity". It's how the internet sees you. If you post about cooking all the time, then you probably like to cook and want to be related to cooking. If you post about cars all the time, then you probably like them and want to be associated with them. On the evil side of this, if someone else is posting nasty stuff about you and you're not putting your best foot forward, well then, you can imagine where that goes. When Google and other search engines "see" your site, that's who they think you are. A cook or a car enthusiast. Or, in the case when someone else is saying nasty things about you, a nasty person.

You might want to share your photos privately with friends and family. This is something I personally want to do. As a father, I want to share a photo of my kids with my mom so she can experience the awesomeness of my children! But the internet isn't ready for such awesomeness. Well, I have a 6d site just for my family and my mom is in my address book. So I post a photo of my son doing an Egyptian dance, click on "mom" in my address book and she gets a message with the photo when she logs into the site. She loves it!

These are just the simple features of 6d. But it's built on a powerful framework and architecture (REST, HTTP, PHP, SQLITE). There's power in simplicity. And I'm excited to see how 6d will be applied on the internet.