(Between the brackets)

Nowadays instant messaging system (IM) are a complete part of our lives, just like email does. Many people have an account on a IM networks like Jabber, MSN, ICQ, or else and use it to communicate quickly and easily with friends.

As all these people I also use instant messaging. It's been now for years that I use this kind of system to chat with my friends and share things. But today, I must recognize that I'm still not completely satisfied with what IM looks like at present. So I decided to write this text as an attempt to summarize my toughts about all this, and suggest some ideas. As I'm not a hacker (hope this will change one day :-) ), I can only propose ideas, event tough I'd also like to implement them, so don't expect anything but ideas (and probably wrong ideas too ;-), so don't hesitate to give me some feedback!)

Scroll blindness is bad for the communication

My first frustration concerning the IM systems are now contacts list. All IM systems nowadays take the shape of an application, an "IM client", that connects itself to a network and display who's online in a list, the contacts list. But, as many people, I have now quite a few contacts, and this list is now quite long! So when I have to find the guy I want to talk with, I sometimes have to search a few moment in this list, scanning trough each name. That's really annoying. But it's not the worst: things are getting a lot more complicated when you have to manage all these contacts into groups, because then you have to display all of them, even the ones who are offline. This is a complete nightmare, because almost no client give a simple mean of doing this^[1].

So I would like to make this conception of contacts list evolve, and change it in something more convenient to use. More precisely, there should a way to search easily for a contact, for example by typing his name somewhere and viewing directly the occurences with what has been typed. There should also be some way of accessing quickly the contacts you talk the most with. In other words, there should some way of having a group of "favourite" contacts that are never further than one click away.

"Proto"-what? What's that?

My second frustration is having to care about what network I use: I really think that users should only care about contacts, and not about login under a specific network. What I mean is: when I want to speak with John Doe, I don't care if I use Jabber, MSN or ICQ, I just want to talk with him. So I think that some kind of abstraction should also be introduced here, so that there would be possible to only have contacts, with statuses, and the possibility to speak with them without caring about having to choose the network used underneath.

Let's be more concrete now

I've already tough quite a bit about all this, and made some concrete proposal in the specific context of the GNOME environment, because it's the one I use, and it already provide much of what is needed to build a powerful communication environment. Here are some more extensive explanation about what I dream of.

First, to address the contacts list problem, I would suggest to move the traditional IM client into an applet, which present itself as an online status editor (I'm bored of having a useless window like contact list wasting space on my screen). By clicking on it, it should be possible to change his status, his status message and also some other actions. For example: go to settings window, show the classical contacts list (because it stays handy sometimes^[2]).

There should be also a way of quickly finding a contact by typing his name, and for this, there is already something: the contact-lookup-applet. So this should need only some modification to the actual applet.

For the second problem, I'd like to have some kind of GNOME IM networks handler daemon that manage the connections with several different networks, and handle file transfers, chats, etc. between contacts, without any reference to the IM network used. This would be great. Concretely, what I'd like to have is some kind of GNOME settings panel where I could set up my IM networks and global prefs. I've already made some mockups about this.

Some kind of conclusion

Well, yes, you guessed it probably, this means I suggest some kind of integration of instant messaging into GNOME, to obtain a powerful and integrated system of communication in the desktop environment. For example the contacts you already have in Evolution could also be the contacts you have in this integrated GNOME IM client. So: one address book^[3] with gives you powerful possibilities. This could go even further, and provide a really powerful communication environment: imagine being able to click on a contact, and choosing if you want to send him mail, to chat or to make a videconference! Without caring about what's beneath! "Just using it", as many other GNOME applications. Imagine you just have to give your vCard to someone so that I could reach you with any of these means... That would be great. This is what I dreamed of, and I just can't help stopping to think of it. Probably the main reason for this is that most of the pieces needed already exist, they just need to be put together (galago, evolution-data-server, IM client like gaim and gossip,...).