The Globe Project is looking at a powerful unifying paradigm for the construction of large-scale wide area distributed systems: distributed shared objects. In Globe, the universe consists of a vast number of shared objects, each of which has some associated methods. Authorized users of an object may invoke an object's methods. A method can return the contents of a Web page, but it can also accept an email or news message, look up a name in a worldwide distributed database, access a file or perform an arbitrary other action.