Welcome to our second add-on release! This is our first release of a new add-on called Thunderbird Contacts.
Thunderbird Contacts was started by the Mozilla Labs team as Firefox Contacts, an experiment with contacts inside the browser. We’ve adapted their add-on to work inside of Thunderbird and added some new features just for Thunderbird.
The goal of add-on is to experiment in evolving the address book of Thunderbird beyond what it currently is today. Thunderbird Contacts isn’t a standalone address book, instead it understands that your contacts live on the web as much as they do inside Thunderbird. The add-on can pull in contact data from various services where your contacts already exist.
Currently it connects with the following services:
- Thunderbird Address Book
- Native Address Books (Mac Address book)
- GMail
- Plaxo
- Yahoo!
How it works
When you install the add-on you’ll be shown this list of services. You can connect to whichever services you’d like to pull in contacts to your local Thunderbird.
As you pull in contacts from each of the services Thunderbird Contacts will attempt to merge the same contacts from different services into a single contact.
Then as you view contacts the add-on will go “spider” out to various services for more information about your contact; this can find flickr photos and websites for the person.
What’s Next?
Future versions of this add-on will likely experiment with organizing the contacts in different ways. Right now there’s a simple list or card like view and we’d like to take those interfaces further. If you have any thoughts or comments let us know in the feedback channel. If you’re interested in trying something just fork the code and start working.
For more information and a screen cast explaining the add-on check out the Thunderbird Contacts project page.
