I frequently use chat and similar means of communication with friends, teammates and other people. But I use a variety of programs and sites to do so, like Skype, Whatsapp, a few social networks, SMSs and maybe a random chat over the web. I also like to keep the history of all messages sent, photos and the like.
I'm looking for some program that lets me consolidate all that into a single "database", so that I can browse the whole interaction with a particular person, no matter where that conversation took place (or if it jumped across services). Much like what most chats allow to do (searching/scrooling the whole history) but containing interactions done with any service, all together in a single listing.
Some features I would like:
- Import chats from a variety of sources.
- Alternatively, convert chats history from a variety of sources into a common format for easier browsing.
- Show a single thread per contact containing all interactions with him, no matter the medium.
- Searching within a "thread", containing chats from that mixed sources.
- Viewing photos, and possibly audio messages within the thread itself, or at least the chance of linking to them for external viewing.
- Ability to manage contacts and identify them across different source programs (that is, contact X from Skpye is contact Y in Whatsapp, for example).
- Everything must be keep locally in my computer, nothing "cloud".
- It would be nice to have an option of settig up separate "profiles". That is, keeping history of my work-related conversations appart from the personal ones.
- Should run natively on Windows, preferably 7 at least. I would consider other platforms if no better option appears.
- Anything free is preferable, open source ideal, and commercial only if nothing else exists.
Note that I don't want a chat client, I'm fine with what I already have in that sense. I just want a way of consolidating all those histories into a single one for easier reading/searching/etc. It doesn't need specifically to be a "database", just something I can have all together in a single place, that's my ultimate goal.
