Yesterday we wrote about Thunderbird being integrated to Ubuntu’s new user interface, Unity. However Thunderbird’s integration into Ubuntu is not about to end at that.

Today Mike Conley, the same person who developed the Unity integration, has said that the next step after Thunderbird Unity Launcher is to get Ubuntu One Contact integration in Thunderbird.

Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service launched by Canonical for Ubuntu users. The service allows users to sync files, contacts etc. across different computers running Ubuntu. Canonical provides the service for free for upto 2GB of storage.

Currently contact sharing through Ubuntu One is supported only in Evolution, which comes as the default email client in Ubuntu. Mike Conley plans to bring this feature in Thunderbird as well.

This is what he wrote:

That’s a pretty cool idea. Imagine it you get a brand new computer, hook it up to Ubuntu One, and blam: all of your bookmarks and contacts are already there waiting for you. Currently, however, Thunderbird does not support sharing contacts via Ubuntu One. And that’s what I’m tackling next.

According to Conley, the plan is to develop an extension which can import the Ubuntu One Contact to a new address book in Thunderbird. This will ensure that contact list from Evolution also appear in Thunderbird as well. Not only that, when you do a clean install of Ubuntu, it will enable you to get back your contact list from your previous installation.To keep things simple at the start, Conley is not planning to allow adding of new contacts from Thunderbird to the Ubuntu One Contact. This feature will probably be added once the contact import feature is done.

With the Unity launcher integration and, now, the Ubuntu One integration, it looks like Thunderbird in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narhwal is going to be very impressive.

If both these features make it to Thunderbird in time, which email client would you prefer – Thunderbird or Evolution?