...bring to the wiki what went through my mind to organize some raw ideas. I am not a programmer, but more somebody who sees possible action. So i do not worry too much if the things I write are actually nice to implement (sorry) 
-- ThiloPfennig 2006-11-08 01:50:40
I had a picture on my mind to use the file manager actually as an organizer for data. Right now filemangers like Nautilus organize files and nothing else. For organizing other information bits you have to use other software.
The idea is to have icons on the desktop that are not real folders or files but functions, but the data itself can be data.
Example: Contacts
Instead of going through menus you have Contact-Icon on the desktop. If you activate it you get a folder view 8that you might as well change to show icon view or list view) with contacts inside. Selecting a contact opens a window that shows the information, maybe it would also be able to open information with tree view or selecting a contact again shows us the elements in a default view.
So this would be a nice and easy way to access the data.
- Other possible features:
Drag & drop the data to other similar folders via network copies the contact data
Drag & Drop to applications. So by this way the data should be migrated. This should make possible to transfer contacts from Thunderbird to Evolution and the like.
Sure this contacts folder should have information about IM online status and also action should be available for a contact should have an entry for writing an email or call somebody.
And if you drop a document on somebody he should have the choice to
![/!\](/gnome/gnome-responsive/img/dialog-warning-symbolic.png "/!\"){kind=small}
I suggest that this example/feature should be implemented first, because I think it would be of the most use. I also think that we really should push this forward in the sense that we do not worry too much about compatibility to Windows. if KDE wants to join lets pull them in, but lets focus to implement network features that really gives GNOME and the free desktops something no other desktop has and so it might be attractive to switch to free desktops because they are the only ones that provide such a cool thing!!
Example: Documents
Instead of organizing documents in real folders one could think of adding documents to a system. A documents added to "the desktop" gets registered with all kinds of meta data. Or lets say it is attached to the desktop.
So by adding the document it is nice to search inside it (via nautilus search field). But also it should be possible to attach a license to it. The meta data inside the document should be visible somehow. So if you maybe drop a CreativeCommons license to a document you get a nice logo. Same for GFDL. The Desktop has licenses as extensions that you can drop or apply somehow to every bit of information. You then can also search all documents under a specific license. Maybe this would mean having plugins for a search engine, too, so basically a search engine just can search for filenames and then has meta-search-plugins?
Example: Dragging & Dropping & Playing
The look and feel of the desktop generally should allow all kind of combinations. I think this could be very much similar like this (fill in here the name of the project of the guy who made this new photo organizing desktop 
). Generally I think that we need to harmonize reactions to actions much more. The user must know what will happen when he clicks. So in music apps Muine and Rhythmbox act very differently if you click on the info field on the panel. Muine opens a dialog if you left click and Rhytmbox shows or hides the players window. Also we must think about what we do with many applications of the same kind. So if I open 3 music players... I can not distinguish the shown icons.
Ok, what I mean is that handling of the desktop has to be very intuitive. So maybe what happens if you drop an audio file on a video file? This could open a dialog that suggests adding the audio to the video. I that fits 100% this could be made easy. if not - open an editor.
Same for text and pictures or text and video - try to guess what the user does, remember what he did last time. Maybe the user also could save his choices in a virtual folder and also could drop choices on two icons.
Also icons that have been used could look differently.
The desktop could show some suggestions - just like the helper actions in some chess programs that give you a hint what next move you can do.