Re: Online Desktop/People apps (short-term)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Adding a couple of more thoughts,

When displaying the list of people, there should potentially be some 
groupings by origin (Facebook, AIM, local network, etc.) or a logo by 
each one showing origin or a filter-by-origin drop-down or something of 
that nature. We don't have to make all "people" look homogeneous, to me 
it is and should be user-visible that this is a merging of people from 
different sites and apps that I use.

To go with that, for the most part _editing_ of people would happen on 
the specific sites; e.g. if I want to change my Facebook friends list I 
go to Facebook to do it.

I would envision Evolution's address book merged in with an origin like 
"Address Book" or "Evolution" or whatever. If I don't use Evolution I 
wouldn't see any contacts from that source.

All of the above is probably clearer if we have specific, concrete UI 
features in mind. I'm basically thinking of the BigBoard people list 
here. In an IM client, you'd want something different - you'd want only 
contacts that were associated with some type of IM the client 
understands. In an email client, you'd want only contacts with an email 
address and might not want local network people.

I don't know exactly. We should evolve this iteratively / as-needed as 
we integrate the list of people into apps.

Another distinction I'd like to throw out there is between a 
multi-protocol IM client and multiple IM clients.

I would see our job here as merging IM status from the IM clients 
someone is using. That could be Pidgin, xchat-gnome, Gossip, etc. in 
addition to Telepathy.

If users switch to Telepathy and the other clients become unpopular, 
then our job gets a lot easier, of course. ;-) But conceptually, merging 
 info from multiple clients is different from replacing multiple 
clients with a single client, if that makes sense.

Havoc