[Adium-devl] Solving, once and for all, problems with contact list ordering and grouping and aliases

[Colin Barrett]

The situation, right now, is horrible. Aliases and group ordering and  
everything aren't synced, and some protocols (*cough*MSN*cough*) don't  
even offer server side storage.

Here's my solution:

Sync all of this to a server on adiumx.com or adium.org or what not.  
The twist, which makes this actually possible, is to store hashes on  
the server. That way a client can easily interpret the server's  
information and correlate it to a particular contact, but no sensitive  
information is actually stored on the server. It might be possible to  
even avoid a registration scheme, and have the entries in the database  
be hashes of the UID of the account (e.g. AIM.mactigerz).

Of course, the protocol would be open (more on my ideas for the  
protocol itself later) and in theory any client could connect, but  
we'd probably want to issue API keys or something, to identify  
clients. I don't think any of us have a ton of experience developing a  
web-based service/server, so this sounds like something we could  
potentially get help from an outside contributor with. :)

Thoughts?

-Colin