ThreePointOne: Contacts

[Travis Reitter <travis reitter collabora co uk>]

As Frederic pointed out, we shouldn't be brainstorming on the 3.2
feature pages, so I thought I'd fill in some details/thoughts on the
Contacts [1] idea here.

The page suggests libfolks and/or libsocialweb for the implementation.
The good news is that Folks 0.5.0 (released last week) added support for
libsocialweb, so using Folks gets you both. In the process, Alban Crequy
also added Contacts support for a few libsocialweb services in
libsocialweb itself (Flickr, Twitter, Last.FM) and upstreamed Marco
Barisione's Facebook support. The remaining lsw services (such as Vimeo
and YouTube) don't have Contacts support yet, but it could certainly be
added.

Some other things to keep in mind:

* Folks has a nearly-ready read-only e-d-s backend [2]
  * making this read-write should be straightforward, since we did that
    with our Tracker backend

* We've also got some plans for search-based retrieval [3], which may be
  useful

As far as the actual UX, I think the combination of contact search from
the shell Activities view (like Morten Mjelva's SoC idea [4] and the
feature bug I've filed [5]) and a "contact center" like Allan Day/Daniel
Siegel/Salomon Sickert/et al mocked up [6][7] would make our Contacts
support in Gnome 3.2 really nice.


[1] https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/Contacts
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638281
[3]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2011-March/005369.html
[4]
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/mortenmj/1
[5] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646137
[6]
https://ssickert.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/gnome-contacts-what-we-really-need/
[7] http://www.dgsiegel.net/news/2010_12_15-gnome_contacts_our_ideas