Here’s a
thought:
Through the use of a Google-like toolbar, it should be possible to provide Everything-like features to the overall World Wide Web itself!
A central server would take care of the voting mechanism and the softlinking, which would communicate directly with the toolbar in the background. Google’s method already does something of the sort, by automatically providing a bar graph with the “linked-to-edness” of the site you’re currently visiting. From there, it isn’t really that far until you duplicate Everything’s feature set. A drop-down listbox on the toolbar could provide the softlinking functionality and the Chatterbox would be similar.
Minuses, however: It would be impossible to provide anything like a “new pages” list (which would be so huge as to be almost useless, anyway), companies would probably have an incentive to artificially upvote their own web pages, there would be no editing, and while it might be possible to delete a page from the web of softlinks it could never be actually removed from the Internet, and it wouldn’t be platform independent. (There are other problems, too, but I lost interest, my attention was stolen by a bright shiny object. Oooh!)