Why Can’t Flickr Be My Wallpaper Back End?

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.