One thing I have often daydreamed about is building amazingly large buildings which were a place to live, to work and to play.  The other day I Stumbled across an image of such a place.  I have designed a few such places myself, more or less, sketching out interesting architecture with areas designated as living space, office space and retail space.  Someday, I think this will become commonplace.  Given how many people work and shop from home now, it’s not a terrible stretch to see a physical location being designed for it.

Right now, however, such things are entirely virtual.  People work from home using the internet, which is also used to do their shopping and their play.  They go places like Facebook, which I think is ready for the next step in this merging of work and play.

I have long wanted to design an application which would go viral.  Most of my ideas have been some sort of CRM (Customer Relations Management) thing which serves both the support and sales needs of a company.  My ideas evolved into an online service where a salesperson or support person would log in and use the tool I designed to do their job.  Salespeople would track their campaigns, contacts, goals, etc.  Support personnel would have a knowledgebase to help resolve customer issues and would have a way of logging support issues, creating and closing support tickets for whatever issues they are contacted about.  Ideally, other departments at a company would be tapped into this tool as well to (for example) help guide marketing based on what sales has found works best or perhaps give product developers an idea of what features to add to their products.

If I can motivate myself to do it, the perfect platform now exists to create this tool:  Facebook.  Well, technically I would develop this tool independently, but I would make it usable via Facebook.  Logins for the social networking site would be used to access the tool.  A company could configure the tool to allow anybody with a corporate email address to access their data in some fashion.  Administrators would be designated, and they would then assign logins to different functions of the tool.

In other words, it’s time for Facebook (or something like it) to mature a little bit.  The time is ripe to start working where we play.