{"id":990,"date":"2006-08-14T09:15:55","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T16:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp\/?p=990"},"modified":"2006-08-14T09:15:55","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T16:15:55","slug":"why-cant-flickr-be-my-wallpaper-back-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2006\/08\/14\/why-cant-flickr-be-my-wallpaper-back-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Can’t Flickr Be My Wallpaper Back End?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In many of the discussions following some<\/a> of my<\/a> desktop<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> that P2P is the way forward, not centralized services such as Flickr, but one is here now and the other is not. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends-observations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}