Hermes
Enrich your Maemo 5 address book with photos and meta-data from online services such as Facebook and Twitter
Why do I want it?
You've copied an address book of contacts to your new N900. Unfortunately, the lovely interface and gorgeous screen are let down by the fact that you see the plain blue man as an picture when contacting people via Phone or Conversations.
How do I get it?
Hermes is currently under development and is in Extras Testing. It is not yet suitable for end-users.
What it does
Hermes connects to the user's Facebook and Twitter accounts and matches existing Contacts entries to their friends on these social networking sites. It uses a heuristic to try and cope with small name variations.
If a contact is matched between the address book and the online identity, Hermes will update the contact on the device with photo (from Facebook or Twitter), birthday - which will appear in Calendar automatically (from Facebook), profile URL (on Facebook and Twitter) and homepage (from Twitter).
There are two modes of operation, "Retrieve" and "Update". The former will fill in MISSING data for a contact; whereas the latter will overwrite (this needs some improvement in terms of documentation).
It uses the official Facebook and Twitter APIs, designed and intended by these companies to allow third party applications such as Hermes.
Future developments
Current developments
Improved error handling & user messagesSlightly clearer "Accounts" dialoguePull down homepage from Facebook as well as TwitterHandling of accents being present/missing between online and Contacts.Allow creation of "empty" contacts containing birthday & homepage info so that Facebook friends' birthdays will appear in Calendar, even if you have no other contact info for them.
Immediate plans
- Improved web page at hermes.garage.maemo.org
- Manual matching for contacts which the heuristic doesn't pick up
Longer term plans/possibilities
- Match "nickname" against maemo.org username.
- Match email address against gravatar.com.
- Investigate pulling contact images from Google Contacts (apparently Mail for Exchange doesn't download images)
- Add an "auto-update" mode for people who regularly change their Facebook profile pictures to allow Hermes to track them.
- Store a history of all images that Hermes has ever downloaded to allow the user to pick from them.