-15

Hello,

Kontact, Kmail, Kopete and many other parts responsible for communication are mature and developed from long time programs. This however also means few drawbacks:

• No easy email setup (user should provide only email address and password, settings should be taken from local or online database or both)
  
• No Google sync {Giving your Google account credentials should give you access not only to email but also to contacts/calendar/bookmarks and sync them with KDE contacts/calendar etc.}
  
• No connection/sync to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter. No merging contacts with Adressbook, no easy actions like clicking contact and choose to write him email, IM, sms, send him message by Facebook, Twitter, write on his Facebook wall, view his calendar, call him etc.
  
• When clicking on contact or during writing him email or chatting I can not see recent conversations/email/calls/files/attachments/his latest status updates or photos or upcoming appointments. (visit xobni.com for inspiration)
  
• There's no information overflow control. There should be inbound (personal messages, personal emails, twitter directs and mentions etc.) and outbound (not personal, general, twitts from friends, facebook stream etc.) channels just like you can see it in Threadsy.
  

In other words I think there should be more social desktop experience combined with "old" communication like emails and IM and I think that Kmail, Kontact, Kopete should be or dropped or totally reworked using technologies like Akonadi, Decibel etc. Inspiration can be found in Threadsy, Xobni, Liaise and Sensobi

I wonder if the Kubuntu team has a KDE port in mind for the upcoming Me Menu in Ubuntu.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeMenu

But I do agree KDE needs more socially-aware app integration. Like a KDE-Social-PIM that provides a summary view of Quassel, Choqok, KMail, and Kopete.

About Google Sync: this is done through Akonadi. There is already a Google Calendar and Google Mail plug-in in development, and with KAddressBook and KMail being ported to Akonadi, these would be simple to add.
Also regarding E-mail set-up: this could be simplified in the POP and IMAP Akonadi plug-in configurations, which the new KMail will be ported to (for KDE 4.5, I'm afraid).
There is also an Akonadi Micro-blogging plug-in - the problem isn't that this isn't easy to do, it's that it's not done already. Choqok would, ideally, be using and building on that plug-in instead of using its own implementation, for example. This would make it possible for Kontact to query e.g. the latest status update from the plug-in.
Again, Akonadi is supposed to deal with contacts and link them respectively - Kopete is being ported to the Akonadi back-end for contacts and history as well, so ideally KAddressBook would query both these plug-ins and link them together, either by itself or by using Nepomuk.


Lots of work is already going into porting these applications to Akonadi, which will let the kind of system you're talking about become easy to develop - nothing needs to be dropped and nothing needs to be completely re-written (although the KDE PIM applications HAVE been completely re-written by choice). Additionally, this depends on third-party developers using Akonadi as well (Choqok) to be as effective as possible.