Hi there,
I think that we should talk more about the problems that we want to solve
and the interesting "bits" of the web world and how to integrate them into the gnome land instead of talking about flickr integration and .emacs uploading.
What do people like about "the web":
* They don't have to deal with files and folders, just content. (personally, I love this from the usability point of view).
* They don't have to deal with installers.
* On community sites, it's easy to share the "online experience" with others. However they usually have some kind of lock-in, for example, youtube and metacafe users cannot "talk" to each other.
They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, they only care about what are they enabled to do. Now, what can't they do with the web:
* They cannot work offline.
* They cannot talk to the hardware (since web servers shouldn't be access to the hardware information directly due to security reasons).
* They cannot have low latency vertical applications, such as video editing (however, this is mostly a bandwitdth problem).
IMHO we should try to merge the best of both worlds and get rid of the disadvantage of both at the same time (sounds easy huh? }:-) It would be a tremendous error to get the bad bits on the web landscape into the desktop.
Centralized vs. Decentralized:
My gut feeling is that we should learn from our own experience in source development, DSCM has taught us how useful and important is to work offline and being able to work without syncing on each change. I can't see why source code development is any different on document writing, or cad desing. For example, abicollab approach is great, work collaborative and at the same time, you have a central point to store the common work[0].
Security:
I was really disappointed about the lack of interest on privacy and security that Havoc expressed in his keynote (don't get me wrong, I do think that your keynote was great Havoc), maybe home users don't care about it, but basically that is due to a couple of things:
* People trust by default, they don't know the details of how technology works, user and password makes them think that's all the security they need.
* The lack of secure-enabled competing products, as an example, (is there any distributed gmail?).
Corporate users do care a lot about security, and the major adoption of GNOME besides developers and enthusiats are large corporate deployments. We should take a closer look about it. However, as long as our
service.gnome.org thing have distributed and opensource version (such as XMPP works) that can be aggregated, that can be workarounded. But it's definitively something that we should care about.
