GNOME has been working quite silently on creating its own flavor of an Online Desktop like gOS and Zonbu but being non-commercial at that.
From their Web-Page at Live.GNOME.org:
Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Firefox, Salesforce.com, and countless other organizations are changing the software we use by shifting applications from the desktop operating system to the web.
The goal of the GNOME Online Desktop is to adapt the desktop to become the perfect window for online applications like GMail, Photobucket, Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia, and countless others that user and developer momentum is shifting towards.
You can see an Alpha-Release Screenshot of it here and a full tour by RedHat Magazine of it running on Fedora 8 here.
GNOME Online Desktop is bundled with Fedora 8 I guess, I haven’t tried it yet and thus unsure of it.
Instructions for building it on other distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc can be found at the JHBuild page of its Website. I’ll try building it on my current Ubuntu – Gutsy Gibbon – 7.10 box once my exams finish by 5th December.
Do check out their Vision page and some Slides from their first presentation.
