Port IM

Unified communications across instant messaging platforms, microblogging services, social networks, and email. Single secure place to store all personal correspondence in a portable format.

Pain

In the era of online communications and social media, users rely on wide variety of tools for person to person conversations more than ever be it private instant messaging or public microblogging. This, in turns, leads to a significant fragmentation of users' data that is now scattered throughout a magnitude of different services. The other challenge represents the need of using multiple services to reach different groups of users as well as the obvious inconvenience of getting used to each product's user interface.

Solution: Unified Messaging Centre

What if all your messages and contacts were stored in a single place and were accessible fromany device that has a browser and Internet access? What if there was a single service that would enable all kinds of communications between different services?

Its main features would be:

• aggregate messages from different messaging services;
• send public messages to all registered accounts simultaneously;
• send private messages with intelligent forwarding;
• metacontacts: a single contact composed of information from different services;
• store complete messaging history;
• import history from local sources (Skype, ICQ);
• search contacts and messages;
• easily download all your stored data;
• push notifications to all your registered clients.

There were many attempts to implement similar ideas, but they were too narrowly focused and lacked coherent vision in providing reach unified communications and therefore didn't get broad user adoption.

Software

Three major parts of solution are cloud storage, server based third-party account connection manager and client software, which includes web, desktop and mobile applications.

In cloud we will persist all user data, including all-time chat history and connections. It will be possible to download selected conversations, contacts in standardized format.

All connections to third-party accounts will be handled by special server module. It will serve as a layer of abstraction between different service implementations and establish secure connection to them on behalf of user. Pluggable architecture will allow us to inject additional services seamlessly and with minimal intrusion into system.

Finally, clean and intuitive clients for different platforms will engage users to spend more time talking to their friends.

Full user interface layout will include four columns:

• contact list;
• personal conversations with selected contact;
• public messages of the selected contact;
• aggregated details on selected contact.

Design will respond to available space so columns will collapse if user shrink browser window, for example.

Technological IP & Innovation

Unified communication. We enable new communication scenarios between people by creating a special medium everyone can connect to with their messaging provider of choice. Once connected, people can start conversations as if they all were on the same platform. For example, there are two users, the first user signs in with his Skype account, the other – with Google+. They can now start conversation as if they both were on either Skype or Google+.

Intelligent forwarding. When someone starts a conversation with other person, system intelligently decides where to send the first message. For example, someone can associate with the service both his Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger accounts. At some point in time, that person is online in Facebook, but offline in Yahoo! Messenger. When the other person sends him a message, system decides to forward it where it will be most likely read, and that is Facebook.

Metacontacts discovery. The more people use the service, the fuller user profiles become. For example, someone adds his Skype and Twitter accounts. All contacts from both accounts get imported. Suppose there is the same person called John Smith in both contact lists. It is possible to indicate that he is in fact the same person and join his contact information. Now assume, the other person signs in with his Skype account whose contact list also contains John Smith. In the second case, there is no need for joining contact info for him, as system already knows both John's Skype and Twitter accounts.