Summer approaches and June is when we start to put together all our plans for the next year. It is traditionally the slowest time of the year as people go outside and find other things to do.  Things start to get interesting again usually around August.  Right now we're working on a new website for Stardock then the same team will start to re-skin WinCustomize.com.  Our hope is to make it so that user swill be able to eventually skin the site themselves (or at least WC subscribers).

We're going to have to make some tough decisions on what skin sections to highlight and which ones to not be on by default.  If you look closely on the skin gallery list on the left, you'll see a little wrench thing. If you click on it, you can control which skin galleries appear by default and which ones don't.  So users can already control this.  But some galleries are clearly on the way out. 

It's a time of change for our community. The community grows and as it grows, new people come in with their own ideas and preferences.  Old favorites like Litestep (for instance) start to fade away.  Litestep is likely to stop being a default gallery shortly.  What about Winamp and for that matter, the entire "skinned" media player movement. What's the future of that? Gadgets and widgets have taken some of the wind out of those things.

Another long-argued issue in the skinning community revolves around fair-use and copyrights.  WinCustomize.com has long had, by far, the strictest rules on copyright of any major skin site. We've tried to protect people's copyrights very aggressively.  But at the same time, we want users to be able to share and download things that they want. This site doesn't exist in a vacuum. Our friends at deviantART have over 22 million items in their galleries.  It's a different kind of site from WinCustomize so it's not quite an apples and apples comparison. But they don't have moderation.  So we try to find a happy middle ground where rips and such are quickly removed but at the same time we allow fan art.

I've written a post here that outlines our policy in more detail with regards to copyright, fair use, and rips.

Going forward, skinning is going to become much more popular than it is even today.  And this year, our job is to fix up and enhance the infrastructure we have on WinCustomize.com to deal with what is almost certainly going to be an unprecedented level of traffic when Windows Vista comes on the scene.  With so many new galleries, new software, and new users, we need to start thinking about -- all of us -- what kind of community we want to be.