Aesthetic. User-experiential. However you want to put it. Which is it? I'm asking you because it's your argument. You're craving a justification for developing

Aesthetic. User-experiential. However you want to put it. Which is it? I'm asking you because it's your argument. You're craving a justification for developing a web application that isn't inherently social--that is clear--but it isn't clear why you think there needs to be a reason or what answer could possibly suffice. There is a public, status-seeking mindset inherent in using email—that's why it works so well on the web. It's actually kind of useless to make it a desktop application; it's just a historical accident that it was first incarnated through the desktop metaphor at all. With all due respect, this is a giant pile of bullshit. Every bit of it. You're just taking what I said and turning it around rather than actually explaining how the web has an inherently social cognitive model. Of course email is social--I pointed that out myself--but it was social long before the web even existed. You've made no connection between the task and the supposed cognitive model. That's the big gaping whole in your argument that I was pointing to. (The bit about desktop email clients being "kind of useless" is just ignorant, and a pointless tangent, so I won't waste words.) The user should be able to download a desktop application and not know that there's a web application sitting at a URL somewhere that it's just accessing and displaying. ...but why? And more specifically...why should this developer do that for this application? the iTunes Music Store. It's all HTML It isn't, actually, and the degree to which it does is more likely due to technical reasons than people somehow inferring a social or asocial cognitive model. It also helps that, y'know, iTunes is a desktop application, and that for the first several years the store existed, iTunes was explicitly required to play the music the store sold. Incidentally, it also is not accessible from the web, except in a different form, making it a poor example of a web application. I'm not clear on what this is supposed to be a "perfect example" of, other than something completely unrelated to the site in question. Yeah, yeah, I get that desktop apps and web apps are different, but please, get to the point. you can change how the user thinks about your service ...but why? Do you have usability studies to back up the idea that only 'social' applications should be on the web, and that 'non-social' applications, even if they are web-based, should be desktop applications?