Show contact details from social accounts

[Peter Bittner]

As a phone user
I want to easily look up contacts that I have either in my address book, or on a Social Account (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, etc.)
So that I don't have to add/merge all contacts to/with my address book that I want to find
And the number of pure phone address book contacts stays small (only the essential contacts)
And I don't have to do time-consuming research for contacts and their details.

Details
=======
Phone address books usually show only contacts you have stored on your phone or a cloud account (like Google Mail or the like). It would make a lot of a difference if Ubuntu's address book could integrate seamlessly with Social Accounts, and pull contact details from there without necessarily adding them or merging them with the phone contacts.

Motivation: I don't want a million contacts in my personal address book, but sometimes I want to get in touch with or look up contacts that I have on LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, etc. A convenient, quick lookup would be awesome.

See Also
========
- Thoughts on unified communication (presence, messaging, voice and video calls) on the mailing list: https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg21701.html
- Bug 1627747 ("generic API for communication and data exchange")

[Felipe De la Puente (fdelapuente)]

Hi,

I think the contact is a person or entity who might have multiple ways of being contacted (channels). So, I like the idea of having one centralized contacts book where the contacts can be uniquified/merged (ideally in an automatic way) and their contact information be added/classified in a usable way avoiding duplicated/redundant information. Then you might have a priority setting for the phone to determine which is the default channel to contact that person and the user should have a easy way to select a non-default channel if needed at the moment of making a call or sending something.

Does that makes sense with this request? Or is the idea to keep the social channels separated from the phone/e-mail channels? Or may be have a way to hide contacts with channel filters (e.g. show only contacts with phone number)?

Best Regards,
Felipe.

[Peter Bittner (peter-bittner)]

@fdelapuente Your ideas perfectly make sense with this request. Especially the "channel filters". If the phone book would allow me to show, say, only my LinkedIn contacts, key cool, I wouldn't have to go on LinkedIn.com to check if I had already added a specific contact. (But most importantly, if I say, show me only the contacts I have (manually) added, i.e. the pure address book content, my list should be short enough. No unintended merging should happen anywhere.)

[Bastien Ho (bastienho)]

What about at least use the gravatar ?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Peter Bittner (peter-bittner)]

With an API approach it should be possible to build a telephony app that handles contacts in a uniform manner. By this it could be possible to maintain the telephone contacts and social contacts as separate data sources, yet still allowing a unified user experience in a single app (e.g. search for a contact -> get the results presented in a collected/combined fashion).

See the concept in bug 1627747 ("generic API for communication and data exchange").