Imagine a web browser that only lets you log in to MySpace and Yahoo!, and breaks when you access Google+, Pinterest, or any microblogging site. This is GOA in 5 years.GNOME Online Accounts is GNOME's attempt at letting your desktop OS work seamlessly with websites. Instead of having to browse to Google Drive's website, for instance, you just open up GNOME Documents and there's all the stuff that you've written on Google Docs over the last several years.It works this way because that's how it's supposed to work. GNOME Documents is useless in this day and age, to a growing number of technical and nontechnical users, if all it can get to is stuff on your hard disk. And Skype has become the universal chat client in the world at large, partly because of its effortless handling of video calls but also because of its seamless way of handling logins and chat logs from any device.Once stuff that works this way becomes the norm, anything that doesn't support it feels broken.The problem is that GOA only supports Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Windows Live, your Google account, and your Facebook account. That's it. There is no easy way to add support for your application to GOA. There is no way to share information from your app to others via GOA. The only way to get GNOME's core applications to work with your web app is to patch GNOME core, which involves persuading GNOME's core developers that your app is an essential part of GNOME.This renders GOA irrelevant, and it renders GNOME's core apps irrelevant. Because by the time any of us realizes an app needs to work with GNOME, a bunch of people will have already stopped using GNOME core apps.The next Facebook will be out for five years before someone from GNOME decides "hey we ought to import your pictures and contacts from this," because it won't be targetted at the demographic which comprises most of GNOME's core contributors. The next Skype will work on Ubuntu first, because it allows apps to add plugins to its version of GOA.This has the potential to cause a bit of a mess, but the alternative isn't a pure and uncompromised user experience. The alternative is GNOME core having to make the decision, for every new web app, of whether or not GNOME should support it. The alternative is new Free Software web apps not working with the premiere Free Software desktop, because they'd rather write a plugin than beg and get turned down anyway.The alternative is nobody using GNOME, because it doesn't work with their stuff."Asking permission from GNOME's core devs" is a solution which does not scale, and which imposes an unnecessary burden on third-party developers. We need a new solution. Because whatever we can do that makes it easier for people to work with GNOME, to write apps for GNOME, to write apps which tie in to GNOME, is a step towards making GNOME more relevant to more people's lives.