Re: online desktop APIs

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

Being able to replace Mugshot-as-desktop-server is neither here nor 
there. Sure, from the Freedom perspective we don't want to rely on a 
particular server [1], but that's not what's going to really affect the 
desktop experience.

What's important from the user experience is not having to rely on 
Mugshot-as-social-network. Virtually none of my friends use mugshot - 
they all use facebook.

So what would actually make this work is server-to-server features - the 
desktop may only need to talk to mugshot, but mugshot needs to tie 
aes gnome org@mugshot.org to my facebook, msn, and jabber accounts. 
These social networks *also* have a variety of presence information, 
friends, social networks, photos, RSS feeds, statuses, and so on 
depending on the service.

I know that mugshot does more than, say, myspace. But if a user has to 
get all of his friends using mugshot instead of (eg) myspace, then the 
end result is that the user can't use mugshot. Or the online desktop.

Hope I managed to get a point across in that ramble :)

--
Andrew

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Though we want to keep things cleanly engineered so someone could 
> replace Mugshot, at the same time using Mugshot is the only practical 
> way to get things going IMO, for a variety of reasons. Some of the major 
> ones:
>   - we need an open source server under the control of the development
>     community, because web services provided by existing sites and
>     companies aren't sufficient. We want to use what exists - say
>     Flickr for photos - but then be able to fill in gaps. So for example,
>     we had to write our own browser for open source apps at
>     http://mugshot.org/applications
>   - it's an admin'd, hosted, clustered application server instance that
>     has both jsp and xmpp channels, and any server-side function can
>     be rapidly added to it; doing a new server-side function from scratch
>     has *a lot* of overhead vs. adding to Mugshot (and also has end user
>     overhead, e.g. signing up for the new server)
>   - because it has web-only and Windows versions, social features need
>     not assume that all my friends use Linux
>   - the "data model" of the Mugshot "meta social network" or whatever you
>     want to call it is what we think we want user experience wise, vs.
>     say a "my contact database" data model. For example, people choose
>     their own photo and nick, and maintain their own addresses, you don't
>     have to import or edit these things.
>   - we already have major functionality slices such as tracking your
>     friends' photos and feeds, tracking who's listening to what,
>     partially-complete file sharing, and social application
>     browsing/installing/launching

[1] especially since mugshot is under teh c0ntr0l of redhat, and redhat 
are evil and going to take over the world with killer rabbits, remember?