I was excited to hear from Ted Gould ironically at the Gnome Boston summit about the Unity Places system and the opportunity to create custom places which can expose all sorts of collections and online connections to the user in interesting ways.
This is not that file system deprecation that people keep on mistakenly banging on about, but instead a way to view interesting data objects in a user session context and even perhaps search on them.
My own ideas range from exposing openclipart to integrating a list of projects from ground control. All seem like pretty interesting candidates. From the wiki the only thing that concerns me is the canonical user space, I’ll live with it but the anti-social contributors agreement makes me uncomfortable to be involved any closer than simple plugins. Hopefully there will be something similar in gnome shell or kde (although preliminary questions on the topic suggested that gnome shell would be a rigid as a board of plywood so perhaps not).
See here for more details: Unity Places Wiki