Patent ID: 8392836

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of selecting contacts in an electronic messaging system for presentation in a display region, comprising: on a computer system having one or more processors and memory storing programs executed by the one or more processors, generating an integrated list of contacts by: identifying a set of contacts of a user; selecting a first subset of one or more contacts from the set of contacts in accordance with first predefined criteria, the first predefined criteria comprising contact interaction criteria based on quantity of prior electronic messaging communications between the user and contacts in the set of contacts; selecting a second subset of one or more contacts from the set of contacts excluding the first subset based on second predefined criteria, the second predefined criteria comprising online status criteria and the contact interaction criteria; and generating for presentation in a display region the integrated list of contacts from the first and second subsets of contacts, including combining and reordering the first and second subsets of contacts; wherein the integrated list of contacts includes, for respective contacts in the integrated list, indicia of current status of the respective contacts, and the contacts in the integrated list of contacts are ordered in accordance with predefined criteria.