Monica: Automated tracking of contacts & conversations

[schuon]

Hey,
I've build a system like yours which automatically integrated one's contacts as well as conversations from a number of sources. What it's lacking is the nice UI you have.

I thought of integrating it (it's written in python as of now), what would be the best vector to do so? I read about the API, is there a documentation somewhere? Then it could be done that way as a first prototype.
Cheers,
Sebastian

[djaiss]

The API is not there yet. We are starting the work on it this week. This is an interesting perspective: you plan to integrate the conversations in the product, and log them?

[schuon]

ah, I see. Well what it does atm is to keep track of the conversations I had with all my contacts across all mediums. Then I can put rules on contact (and groups) such as: "be in touch at least every 30 days" or "send me a reminder of the upcoming birthday". It gathers all these informations automatically - I'm a lazy guy :)

[yamakadi]

I think this would be a great to have as an option, but I'm not sure users would be willing to trust the hosted platform with enough credentials to access messages (even just when they talked with who) and other private information. Also, if the function is aimed at multiple disparate services, either the system or the user would need to normalize their contacts accross the board and make sure there are no duplicates and all, or at least most, contacts are associated with correct events and the like.

If the proposition is to somehow include @schuon 's python system either as an external API or expose functionality of Monica to that system through its API, I think it creates issues of trust with even self-hosted instances as they'd need to authenticate with that app somehow and give up their credentials. I don't think these are in line with the project's simplicity goal.

[djaiss]

@yamakadi this is a valid point.

I was not implying that it would be built-in the product anyway. This is why the API will be there anyway - allow people to do this kind of things if they want to, but I'm not sure that the product itself should contain this kind of code. I for sure wouldn't want Monica to hold information about all those social accounts. Scary.

That being said, this is a good discussion to have.

[schuon]

Well, I think it would be neat to do it through the API and have people who want it (if it's only me) connect the API and pump the data over into Monica. I use FullContacts for contact management, it works great for de-duplication and alike.
I also agree on the security issue and have been looking into different options to improve. One could be, that each users get docker containers they launch in their own AWS account - so they retain ownership of the data. I definitely see the issue but had decided for me to postpone it until I have a working version to figure out if users want the product in general.

Do you have an ETA on the API?

[djaiss]

ETA: as soon as possible 😄

[waldyrious]

Another tool that would be great to integrate is @jberkel's SMS Backup +. It saves both SMS and calls, so that would be fantastic for Monica's usability!