Re: ThreePointOne: Contacts

[Travis Reitter <travis reitter collabora co uk>]

On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 13:48 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 09:29 -0700, Travis Reitter wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> this makes a lot of sense, but we really need a way to send messages to
> facebook/twitter contacts, or do other operations on the other services
> (see photos from flickr, listen to music in last.fm, etc).
> 
> So, are there any plans for a twitter/facebook client app?

None that I know of. We already support Facebook's XMPP chat through
Telepathy but not its email-like messaging system. Can third party
clients use that anyhow? I thought that was completely walled off.

I'm not terribly familiar with the details of Twitter - it just supports
140-char global posts and private messages between users, right?

Handling sending these messages is probably best implemented as protocol
handlers for Evolution, since they don't quite fit in with Telepathy's
model and I think libsocialweb avoids communication to keep its scope
narrower.

There's also the question of whether we should be encouraging people to
use Facebook's or Twitter's private message systems when email is quite
a bit more open/easily-accessible/user-controlled.

-Travis