[Gossip-dev] Improvement Ideas

[Martyn Russell]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 18:05 +0100, Richard Hult wrote:
> Martyn Russell skrev:
>  > If you don't want people to know that your presence information you
> > shouldn't use an Instant Messaging client. The whole point is real time
> > communication of presence and messaging and if you don't want that,
> > perhaps you should be using email.
> > 
> > It just sounds like you have seen an "invisible" state somewhere else
> > (like MSN Messenger) and thought, I want that in Gossip, unless you can
> > give me a couple of use cases that I haven't considered :)
> 
> Heh, that's unfair imo. 

Yes, I realised that after sending - sorry CJ van den Berg.

> The use case is just that, that you sometimes
> want to be online but not tell everyone that you are. I definitely see a
> use for that and would use it myself if we had the feature (for example
> if I don't want to be contacted on a friday night because I'm dead tired
> but still want to talk to a friend, or just to see if he's available).

Mmm, gah - ok :P, that's a good use case.

> >>> 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.
> 
> This is not exactly the same thing. The main reason for not having an
> away state that "sticks" when you're at the computer is because it's so
> easy to forget to say you're available when you are. The invisible thing
> is meant for privacy reasons, and is better for that, instead of faking
> that you are not at the computer by abusing the away state for that.

I just asked Sue (Mrs Russell :) and she uses it a lot too, so it looks
like it is just me against the world here :)

OK, so perhaps we could do this.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn