Communication Integration

Communication is a huge part of the Internet, was half of the original purpose of the Internet but by far the biggest use of it. Social networking, instant messaging, e-mail, google wave, status updates and microblogging, normal blogging, Voice Over IP, SIP Phones, Skype, Video conferencing, text messaging and probably more are major habits of the modern computer advocate.

NetOS will have all of this built in, with integrated account management tools you can easily add in any email, social network, or IM account and instantly start receiving your updates directly from your desktop.

An advanced address book will allow you to see all your contacts or separate them per-account or through many other filters. You'll be able to combine contacts, merging the same person together that you might have on multiple accounts making it easy to find the best way to communicate with that person.

Using services online we also hope to offer phone services for calling landlines and mobile phones and texting mobile phones using existing free services. When possible we hope to allow you to add in your own phone number so it will appear as you calling from your own phone when you call from your computer.

We also hope to allow you to connect your phone via Blutooth to your computer and allow your computer to intercept phone calls and help sync your address book on your phone. Later we hope to offer mobile apps to sync automatically.

Using the cloud-storage service as well we hope to offer secure storage of your communications, allowing you to log all your conversations, even your text messages, call logs, emails, instant messages - securely and index them all so you can search through them and view your conversation logs with a certain people.

Another commonly used feature is a Calendar. We hope to integrate use of a calendar and allow you to invite contacts to events you create and have them be invited independent of what service they're on, so if you invite a friend on Facebook it will appear as a Facebook Event, and if you invite someone through am Email it will send them an invite link.

We do not hope to create a new communication protocol or even a new instant messaging service, that seems pointless to use as XMPP is a very good protocol and it'd be impossible to beat Skype's amazing voice quality. Therefore we hope to only integrate support for all the major communication methods and make it robust enough to allow other people to add support for other services.

We also hope to design this system to be a realtime system, allowing for services to push data to the user when available, when most instant messaging services are already doing this, most social networks and email accounts don't. We hope to be able to use the recently added push features offered by Twitter and make the most out of email providers that allow pushing of data. We are looking at Android 2.2's push data API being added for developer use currently to reuse the same concept.