[Gossip-dev] Improvement Ideas

[CJ van den Berg]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 10:54:37AM +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 01:51 +0100, Keywan Najafi Tonekaboni wrote:
> > What about a "invisible"-state in gossip. Was there a discussion about
> > it in the past. I would like to have the possibility to go invisible in
> > jabber.
> 
> I can't see the point in this to be honest. Why would you want to do
> that? 

I would imagine that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you would
not want someone to know that you are at your computer, or even _which_
computer you are at. IMO privacy is a big issue in instant messaging and
presence applications and invisibility and/or forced away status are useful
when I don't want my computer to broadcast to the whole world where I am and
what I'm doing.

> <rant>
> Say you have that feature and you see a bunch of users online. Those
> users that are offline may not actually be offline, so it falls into the
> same category as those requests we get from users saying they want to
> set their state to away while using their computer. It means your status
> is not truly representative and therefore less meaningful.
> </rant>

This is not true. The usefulness of the information stays exactly the same.
Whether I am _actually_ offline or whether I just _say_ I am offline is
irrelevant. The fact that I am unavailable stays the same. Instant
messaging is not a tool for spying on people and you can't force other
people to tell you where they are and what they're doing.

-- 
CJ van den Berg

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