social services as a desktop service?

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi

During the development of Ubuntu Karmic, I discussed with some people
about having social services accounts (facebook, twitter, etc)
configured in one place, about-me specifically. Since it was a bit late
for GNOME 2.28, I postponed the discussion, but now that 2.28.0 is
almost out, I'd like to start it here.

So, the idea is to have a central place where all those accounts are
configured, so that applications using those services (gwibber for now,
not sure if there are some others?) can just use that instead of having
to ask the user in every application his/her credentials for those
social services.

So, there are several things to discuss:

* is about-me the correct place for this?

* should we only provide configuration of social service accounts, or
does it make sense to have all web services accounts configured there
(social services + flickr + last.fm + IRC + IM + mail + etc etc)?

* should about-me (or wherever the code lands) just provide the accounts
configuration, or should it also provide access to their protocols (of
course, via a separate (dbus) service) so that any app can just use that
instead of implementing the protocol itself? I guess the protocol's
implementations can live in different places, like Empathy for IM, e-d-s
for mail, calendaring, and others, not just in one place, but at least
should there be an easy way for apps to access any of them?

anything else?