View source for User:Standard8/Address Book Future

The notes on this page came out of a Mozilla Messaging work week, they are not "set in stone" and they are exploring the possibilities of the address book within Thunderbird.

== Background ==

The address book is a small, but significant part of Thunderbird. It has the ability to link together different forms of communication for contacting the same individual.

If we didn't have the address book, then the user would have to search through previous emails, or maintain some other form of list for keeping in contact with other users.

At the time of writing, Thunderbird links together:

- Emails
- Postal Addresses
- Phone Numbers
- AOL Instant Messaging screen names.

Storing information about a user's contacts is a vital function; it provides the means for the user to talk to someone easily. Additionally, with the increase in web activity, the ability to move your contact information amongst different applications (be they web or local) is becoming increasingly important.

== Where should address book be heading? ==

=== People Store ===

We need to be moving the focus from "Address Book" to a "People Store".

The People Store would contain knowledge of all the contacts known to Thunderbird, with information on how to contact them, and whatever extra information the user wishes to supply.

=== Gloda indexing ===

The People Store would be indexed by Gloda, and therefore would be searchable alongside emails/messages.

=== Links to non-Thunderbird sources ===

Thunderbird needs facilities to link its contacts with other sources, e.g. Facebook, Google Contacts, other applications, devices etc (although we do have some extensions already in place for this).

The People Store should (where possible?) unify the contact data from individual sources and present it in that unified fashion to the user.

Updating a contact should feed the individual sources with as much data as possible, whilst respecting user preferences for which stores may contain which data.

Whatever we implement within Thunderbird it should be standards based. Doing so should allow us to share information with multiple sources easily.

Extensions should also be able to implement their own sources.

For Thunderbird, the priority will be implementing a standards based net/web protocol. This has the big advantage that users can interface Thunderbird to their favourite (multiple?) web applications. Additionally, this can be taken further into providing a local server-like application that can be capable of synchronising with individual devices.

=== What do we really want? ===

* Unified store, not dependent on particular protocol
* Ability to remote address books, but have local caches.
* Address collection with intelligence
* Ability to group/view etc as required