Re: [Evolution] RFE: instant messaging integration

[Bill Anderson <bill noreboots com>]

On Mon, 2001-10-08 at 07:46, Abe Fettig wrote:
> > Perhaps the designers behind Evo could setup some sort of plugin specs
> > to expand capabilities, sort of like what is done for a browser like
> > Mozilla/Netscape.
>
> Well, evolution does support one open standard for pluggable content:
> RDF.  That's the open XML format Evolution uses for the news feeds on
> its summary page.  Although RDF is usually used for news headlines,
> there's no reason it can't be used for other types of content as well.
> It would be very easy (and perhaps it's already been done) to write a
> perl or python script that looked up a list of buddies/contacts in an IM
> system and returned the results as RDF.  Then you could add it to your
> executive summary.
>
> This (providing information in machine-readable format through a web
> site) is what Dave Winer or Bill Gates would call a "Web Service".
>
> The only thing holding Evo back here is that it doesn't honor the
> <image> tag for an RDF channel.  Instead, it displays all newsfeeds with
> the Ximian web icon.  It would be nice to get this fixed, so that you
> could make the buddies newsfeed stand out visually from the others.
>
> If there's serious interest in this feature, I'd be happy to build a
> prototype and host it on my web site.  Let me know.

That would be awesome. I've been building a distributed calendar/task
managing service that would integrate wonderfully with evolution. After
I deployed it, O was going to look at what it would take to provide a
"plug-in" for evolution that connected to it, post Evo 1.0. I was
looking at more of a SOAP interface, though I might be able to code in
an RDF interface...

Bill