MENLO PARK, Calif.—Sun Microsystems has quietly let it slip that it is running private beta tests on a new set of development tools specifically designed for building social networking applications in the cloud.

Zmbly, the project's internal name, was released to a select group of beta testers about a week ago.

"You can think about it as a development environment for building social applications [in the cloud]," Ian Murdock, Sun vice-president of developer and community marketing, told me today at a conference about Sun's 2008 open-source road map on the company's campus here. These applications are "like Facebook applications, Google gadgets, etc.," Murdock said.

"In some ways it's an experiment," Murdock said. "In other ways, it's a pretty fundamental part of our cloud strategy—the notion that our cloud is essentially going to be a 'cloud of clouds.'  How do you take services, wherever they live on the Web, and put them together in a way that's more structured than a mashup?" he asked.

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