I would venture that this is THE frontier for the desktop, to see itself seamlessly integrated into the online world. And it's not just "web aware" but cell-phone aware, p2p aware, and generally "network aware." I've been noodling for some time on the idea that we need some kind of equivalent to the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines, only for the new world of networked applications.

So far we've bolted some network awareness into existing applications. Things like automatic network updates, stock quote downloading, and so forth. We are just starting to see applications that capitalize on network acccess -- the whole social software category is an example of this. At the same time, the network fabric that applications can plug into is getting richer. We have WebDAV, Rendezvous, various IM protocols.

One observation I'd like to make is that these new applications are going to operate as consumers of services. And those services include things that we typically have seen as being part of the application. Tim writes about buddy lists. Well, buddy lists should be a service that is available to any app that wants to use it. The last thing I need is another buddy list/address book to synchronize. I need a system wide buddy list that is linked to a system wide address book. I'm not talking about Outlook. I'm talking about something that any network aware application can go to and get this kind of information. All the stuff that's in a PIM like Outlook should be available as this kind of service. Here's another opportunity for the Chandler folks. Make Chandler a system service for this information. Give me SOAP/XML-RPC/REST api's to get this information.

The notion of desktop wide data services leads directly to Tim's point 6.:

We really need to understand who owns what, and come up with mechanisms that protect the legitimate rights of individuals and businesses to their own data, while creating the "liquidity" and free movement of data that will fuel the next great revolution in computer functionality. (I'm doing a panel on this subject at next week's Open Source Convention, entitled "We Need a Bill of Rights for Web Services.")