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* What's the scope of "instant messaging"?
** In this context, IM may extend to social network communications, or even to telephony or anything providing a more "instant" communication than email.
** Which protocols networks of "instant" communication make sense here probably depend ?*** Probably depends on what the users we target need or already use. 'protocols' might be less relevant than 'network' from a user stand point. I suggest we use this word rather than the technical one.** What network list should we consider ?
*** Need some user research.
** The short term goals we pick need to be compatible with the long term vision.
*** Is it OK to rely on other IM clients of the system if we intend to develop a mobile version later?
*** If we want to help users to "own" their data by regrouping all the communication data in a single place where it's easy to manage, is it acceptable to delegate communication tasks to external applications? (shouldn't we have control over encryption? are there potential privacy issues?)
|Feature overview=The goal is to bring additional value to Thunderbird users by leveraging instant messaging communications. In other words, to enrich the email experience with instant messaging functionality.
|Feature users and use cases=Targeted users are people who use Thunderbird for their emails and may IM the same set of contacts.
Additional value should come from bringing IM features closer to Thunderbird, for example:
* Seeing that the sender of an email is available to chat may lead the user to decide an IM conversation is better to get some clarification about some points of the email he was reading.
** Then, the IM conversation could be able somehow "attached" to the email. The conversation could annotate the email with this IM conversation, i.e attach parts of so that searching the archives for the email also brings up the IM conversation as comments to the email. This enriched conversation will then be fully searchable and archivable.
* When a user is about to start an IM conversation with a contact, showing the list of exhanged emails with this person could avoid wasting time for both people (maybe the desired information is right there in the bulk of unread emails? Maybe the latest email explains why the person wouldn't be able to give a useful answer anyway? ...)
* When trying to get back to some piece of information obtained in the past from someone, searching in both email and IM archives removes for the user the burden of remembering which communication medium was used.
* If emails are shown in a conversation view, integrating in that view the IM conversations that happened on the same subject could give a better overview of the exchanges.
|Feature dependencies=* Address book updates to support IM addresses for different networks (?)
* Composing in a tab, so that potential IM activity indicators placed in the main UI stay visible. (?)
|Feature requirements=* Manage contacts for email and IM in a single place.
* Search both Email and IM archives at once.
