communication

Right now I am feeling overwhelmed..

I have the following for communication online:

Outlook for work email and contacts
Trillian/msn.yahoo messenger for IM (and if I have to AIM)
Skype for making calls
Hotmail/gmail for personal email
Feeddemon/newsgator for rss feeds
Wordpress for blogging

It’s a nightmare - nothing talks to each other. My Outlook being the central point for most of my communication has the most full information for all my contacts - whether it be family, friends or colleagues. It stores most but not all of my email. It’s the centre of how I communicate online. It could be where I manage all my communications offline surely? (what can manage all my communications online? - something that could connect to meebo, webmail etc). Maybe it just needs to be a storage system for historic communication and contact information with a decent API - If there was one program that could manage all this (and I emphasize manage - it does not have to provide all the functionality); I would drop Outlook to just an email client in a second. Maybe it could be Google Base in the future?

I just got invited to test the Windows Live Messenger Beta; and whilst its pretty and there are some neat features I am yet to really see the reaons for the name change. (go to the Messenger blog for more info!). My Messenger contacts are separate to my Outlook ones and my Gmail ones - though not separate to my Hotmail ones - which is a mess as I do not use my Hotmail contact list very much. I can see if any of my Messenger buddies have a spaces blog and see if they have updated - but not if they have any other type of blog.

Sure, I know I could do the following:

ditch Wordpress for Spaces
ditch gmail for Hotmail
ditch Skype for the new Windows Live Messenger (might yet do this anyhow once I test it a bit more)
ditch feeddemon for RSS popper, or get the next version of Outlook when it is released (which I am sure I will do..)

The first 2 are just not an option for me right now - who knows when new versions come out - but right now its a no way. Even if I did this it wouldn’t solve all my problems  - what about Messenger/Outlook contact integration? - at the very least they should sync. Ideally - I should be able to set a source and voila - the relevant contacts and their additional info all appear in my chosen email, phone and im software. I could then..

Use that storage system to:
Manage my contact list and their associated info (phone, blog/rss link, im, email address, snail mail etc)
Store all historic communication (or whatever I define)

Everything else then refers to this source..

So, when I send an email, I type a name into the send to field and it pulls the info from the above source.
When I IM someone it knows the IM network they use and connects to them
Same with calling someone
Same with RSS feeds
Same with webmail

Who is going to build it? Is it all a pipe dream?

[update] sorted out some grammar; cleaned up some sentences and made myself more clear! Added some more ideas

[update] deli.cio.us (shared favourites) would also integrate well into this system.

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For once a blog entry on the hardware behind the network rather than the pretty front end stuff that lives online I just wanted to shout about cisco routers - I am in the middle of transitioning networks - no fun task I can tell you - especially with the vast array of different versions of operating systems and software  that will arise and mix from the ashes. Anyhow, rather than have to move the old systems across to a new network address so it could continue to have connectivity alongside the new network, it seems my nice cisco router will let me have both the old and the new running at the same time. (I give you I probably would have figured out a way of just building an interface between the new networks rather than transition the entire old network, but even so). Anyhow with the Cisco router I can have both networks running at the same time.

By the way, I am no network guy so maybe most routers can do this - one thing is for sure my old linux router I had running couldnt (no room for more network cards.. ) Anyhow it just saved me several hours work.. its definitely a bonus

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not had much time for a while to blog - been way too busy! so a quick one that just got pointed out to me..

nice! its always the little things…

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