Somewhere around 2008, a web developer had an idea that was ahead of its time. Not a blog. Not a directory. Not another flat grid of banner ads. He wanted to build something the internet had never seen: an interactive sphere, spinning in space, covered in clickable tiles — each one a small piece of real estate in a three-dimensional world.
He registered the domain. He had a name for it: Huduzu. He started building. Then his health failed him, and the project stopped.
"He couldn't continue his project. His dream sat in a domain registrar, dormant, waiting for someone who understood what it was supposed to be."
James Hamelton, founderI found the domain listed for sale not long after. The developer's circumstances meant he had to let it go. I didn't know him well — we'd crossed paths the way developers do online, through forums and comment threads and the small informal world of early web dev. But I recognized what he had built the seed of, and I acquired it.
I kept it. Renewed it every year. Told myself I'd build it eventually, when the time was right, when the technology caught up with the vision, when I had the bandwidth between the other projects and businesses and the life that keeps accumulating around you.
Seventeen years is a long time on the internet. Languages changed. Frameworks rose and fell. The web became social, then algorithmic, then exhausted. The indie web almost died and started coming back. And the domain sat in my account, renewing quietly, waiting.
I don't know if the original developer is still with us. I hope he is. But whether or not he ever sees this — I think about the version of him who had this idea before the tools really existed to do it justice, who saw something that would have taken real technical courage to build in 2008, and who had to walk away from it.
"If his spirit can see this: your idea was good. It was always good. It just needed time to catch up with you."
James HameltonThe sphere you see on this site is what he imagined. A living, rotating world. Tiles you can claim. A full page behind each one — your brand, your story, your link, your products, your life. Not a banner. A destination. Embeddable. Interactive. Yours.
Huduzu launches soon. There are 94 tiles. Some of them will be gone fast. Two of them — the polar tiles, the rarest positions on the sphere — have never been owned by anyone. That's still true today.
This is, finally, what it was always supposed to be.