With so many competing IM and chat services you end up using by accident or intention – from GTalk when you log into GMail to Facebook when you login to Facebook – it’s by no means unusual to have 3 or 4 entries for the same person sat taking up space in your Empathy contact list.
A preferable solution would be to have all of Benjamin Humphrey’s entries for Facebook, GTalk, MSN & Yahoo consolidated into just one listing, a la many smart phone address books. Well, wish no more!
MetaContacts in Empathy
In an announcement on the bug report asking for this feature Empathy developer Guillaume Desmottes has confirmed not only is this feature done and dusted it’ll be available real soon: –
“Thanks to the hard work of Travis and Philip, Empathy master is now able to
link contacts together and meta-contacts are displayed in the contact list. I
think it’s finally time to close this bug”
“For those wanting to test it, I suggest you to wait for Empathy 2.31.91 that
will be released on Monday. Feedback is of course welcome but please do check
if your bug has already be reported before opening a new one. They should be
filled using the ‘Meta Contacts’ component”