The Gnome Desktop gives us many fantastic ways to get in touch with other people – email, chat, audio and video calls, social networking sites – but these options currently lack a major feature: integration. Specifically, these capabilities lack a cohesive, centralized concept of a person. That’s where Soylent comes in.
Soylent pulls together People as first-class objects from various sources: Evolution Data Server for address book information; Telepathy (via Empathy) for real-time status; and (eventually) major social networking web services. Using this information, Soylent gives you one-click access to chat, email, voice and video chat with anyone you care to!
In addition to building a solid people browser, the Soylent project is developing a pair of libraries to integrate People even further into the Gnome desktop. The in-progress libsoylent will make it easy for any desktop app to access known people. For instance, Gnome games could make network play a matter of picking a friend from your address book; Abiword could make starting collaborative editing just as easy. libsoylent-gtk will provide pre-written widgets, such as a “Select Person…” person chooser (an analog to the standard file chooser).
This talk will go into depth on the motivations for Soylent (which problems Soylent is trying to solve), as well as the current state of the project and future plans.
Read more about Soylent: http://live.gnome.org/Soylent
