Nowadays, people use instant messaging and electronic mail, subscribe to social networks, follow podcasts and blog feeds and all this from different communication devices. While through those activities, the goal is to exchange information, the underlying tautology is that it’s always a matter of contacts.
As of now, we are stuck with the proliferation of independent and disconnected applications and appliances, each one tearing unique logical entities, contacts, away to make them fit into limited models. In simpler words, the way applications treat contacts bring a bad user experience.
In this talk, we’ll first discuss the problem of contact management, see why it is so important to solve it and how doing such an effort at the desktop level could hugely benefit to the user in its daily use of his computer.
We will also demonstrate the solution we propose, the People Framework, which aims to provide an unified way to access and manipulate contacts for the desktop applications, emphasizing on the gains of integration with the existing technologies.
We plan to show various demos during the talk showing various use cases for the People Framework, for example a “People” menu applet, or an address book synchronization source and sink for Conduit…
The scope of the People Framework, as well as the various possible applications are described thoroughly in Johann’s blog.
