In many of the discussions following some of my desktop musings, I’ve been challenged to identify features that would describe the type of network/local infrastructure I’m envisioning. Most of the time, I settle for mundane topics like simple network shares, webmail as a desktop application and so on.
But as I was changing my desktop wallpaper yesterday evening, it struck me: I’d really like to have Flickr as a back end for the GNOME Wallpaper applet. I’m frequently asked where I get the backgrounds from the screenshots I post, as some of them are quite nice, and obviously well beyond my limited photographic abilities. The answer is pretty simple. I regularly visit Flickr’s most interesting photos from the last 7 days. I favorite the ones I find most appealing, then check to see if they have multiple sizes available. If they do, I download the one closest to monitor size and drop it into a wallpapers directory, then add the new acquisitions to the GNOME applet. Done.
But what if the GNOME applet had (optional) seamless access to Flickr, and I could browse that way? Then cache the pictures I like and were available in the right sizes and under the right license terms? I’d be a fan. Now I know that Luis and others believe that P2P is the way forward, not centralized services such as Flickr, but one is here now and the other is not.
Would a Flickr back-end be an earth-shattering feature? The kind that would sell a new operating system? Certainly not. But the strength of the web has always been diversity, not a single killer feature – for those of you about to argue “But Facebook and MySpace…” you make my point for me. I think a web desktop would benefit from a similarly diffuse approach, one that embraced and the diversity on the web by extending it more broadly on a local level.
