Social Desktop Starts To Arrive In KDE

FrankKarlitschek writes "At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost."

Cool

[stoolpigeon]

I like the idea. I find that I tend to look for desktop clients for a lot of connected stuff that I do. In fact I'm writing my own PyQT twitter client right now because I couldn't find a desktop client for linux that really works well and has the features I want. (The adobe air stuff is close but is flaky - crashes, etc.)

I wouldn't mind at all seeing more of this being pulled tighter into my workspace.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[tick-tock-atona]

WTF?

Because a lots of new codes have been done in digiKam for KDE4, we need to stabilize current implementations before to play with Nepomuk. Also, the new Database interface from Marcel which is already very stable need to be polished before to be interfaced with Nepomuk. So, it's something planed for 0.11.0 release.

Gilles Caulier

Use choqoK for you microblogging needs Re:Cool

[SteamedPenguin]

Are there features in choqok that you are missing? http://choqok.gnufolks.org/ [gnufolks.org]

Re:Existing Features

[lbbros]

You do know it took seven years for the 3.x codebase to stabilize, right?

Re:The Widget

[who knows my name]

I think it's called a wiki.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[segedunum]

Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting.

No, they focused on the wrong things and some of the right stuff they focused on was half-baked to the point of being unusable so it never turned into anything an end user might feel the benefit of.

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Which is exactly what the CDE guys did about fifteen years ago when they declared CDE as a 'standard', looked at Windows and Mac OS and said "We don't need anything developer friendly. We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff. Who wants to play something called Half Life anyway?" Microsoft also said "Who needs the internet?" and quickly realised they were wrong. I'm sure no user asked for any of those things until they came along. The world moved on and left CDE in its own sad little world.

We all now that no one uses any of that stuff and Microsoft was right about the internet, right? Your statement is so stupid on so many levels it isn't even funny. Why bother with any new functionality at all? We all know that each new version of software can be sold on the basis that it has 'less' functionality so it 'doesn't get in your way' right? I'm afraid no one is moving off Windows and Mac OS with that strap-line. The sad part is that you probably believe it even when the contrary has been pointed out and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on. Either people don't see it or they just don't want to see it.

Chagning the subject line of the thread won't make it true either.

Java version of a social semantic desktop

[Paul Fernhout]

I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ [sourceforge.net]
"The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."