I don’t think you would lose anything if your evolution data server talked to Telepathy and told you whether or not people are online. It would not dumb down your interface, it would make it richer.

The graphical interface itself being Evolution or a set of separate mini-interfaces would hopefully remain a matter of choice, even though something does have to be the default option.

Realistically, Evolution is not likely to go away any time soon. My hopes rely on enriching the Telepathy-based apps such as Empathy by making them and e-d-s talk to each other and extending the telepathic interfaces to email and complete address databases, not about removing existing options.

I don’t agree with this approach because as others have stated, when I want to contact someone, I want to do so in a particular way. I choose the contact method based on a multitude of factors, including the personality, ethnicity, and comprehension level of the person I am trying to communicate with. I work with many people in India and often have a hard time understanding their voice because of accents. Most of these people are highly intelligent and we can communicate effectively in e-mail or IM, but because of the difficulty I have with their accents, not over the phone. So if I am going to contact a person who I know has a thick accent, I choose either e-mail or IM depending on the content to be communicated. On top of that, there are certain people who I just don’t like to talk to because their personality rubs me the wrong way. I can communicate with them politely and effectively in non-verbal ways, but if I speak with them on the phone, my dislike of them might be conveyed in my tone, impeding communication.

While I respect your opinion that communication should be people centric and not application centric, your opinion is just that, an opinion and in my application centric opinion, the approach you advocate would make me less, not more productive.

I also think that the rant about Firefox including the application name in the title bar is too cynical. I believe that the reason it is there is just as likely to be the following. Because not all browsers are created equal and there are rendering quirks with each of them, web developers often need to check their pages in multiple browsers. So by tagging the title bar with the browser name, it make it immediately obvious which browser is rendering a particular page. It may be also there for the reasons you stated, but I find it unfortunate that you automatically ascribe negative motives to it without considering that the programmer who added this bit of code may have just been trying to help people like me to work more efficiently.

I am not opposed to having an option to use a computer in the method you describe as long as you make it optional. I like Evolution the way it currently is. The beauty of open source is that you could implement your idea with a Evolution-lite that is independent of Evolution and we can both be happy.