It's beginning to look like the only thing protecting the desktop from irrelevance is the lack of a widely deployed easy to use infrastructure for private URL spaces. What's changing the desktop from enabler to encumbrance is our poor ability to integrate our local data with the many web service providers that are quietly starting to dominate the attention landscape. The ability of data to integrate into these services is beginning to dominate all other uses of data.
This struck home with me as Infoworld gave up on homegrown taxonomies and started just using del.icio.us instead. The thinking used to be that providing structure was what a content provider did, but now Infoworld is turning that model on it's head and just trusting the common taxonomy instead.
With any luck this will also mark the beginning of the end of the ridiculous notions of deep links and front pages. Clearly, when Infoworld gives up owning the taxonomy, each Infoworld page has to survive on it's own merits, independently of any site map Infoworld has canonized.

I am aware that this may seem like old news to many readers, and I agree that it is, conceptually. As a practical problem however, it is only now becoming a huge problem as the variety of services available to augment your data just keeps growing. It's also worth noting that so far SOAP has had nothing to do with this new services world.