[Gossip-dev] Improvement Ideas

[CJ van den Berg]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 04:41:57PM +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> I agree privacy is quite important in Instant Messaging and it is
> important that the user should be able to control how much interruption
> they receive as by configuring the software.
> 
> 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.

An all or nothing solution is not enough though. What if you _want_ to be
seen as online but you want to be able to hide from just one or two people
on your roster?

> 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 :)

I have no idea what features MSN provides. I haven't used anything but
jabber in years.

Here's a concrete use case for you which is a common scenario for me.

Say I'm online and surfing the web, probably chatting with one or two
friends and generally just hanging out and relaxing. Some one on my list
comes online. Now, this person, although they are a good friend, tends to be
a bit of a nuisance. Perhaps they ask too many questions, or maybe it's my
boss or something. Maybe I just don't feel like talking to them for some
reason.  They can see I'm online so they pull up a chat window and say
hello.

Now, I don't want to go offline (because I'm talking to other people) but I
don't want to talk to them either. What are my options? If I just ignore the
person's request to chat they may well be offended and I don't want that.
After all, they can _see_ I'm online; I'm just not responding to their
messages.

Without a per user invisibility/away/unavailable type feature there is no
way to politely avoid a conversation and still be able to continue another.

> > > <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. 
> 
> But you are not unavailable, you can still be sent messages even if you
> appear offline, and your client would still receive messages (if users
> send you messages for you to receive when you return online) since you
> aren't really offline.

I know I can still receive messages. By unavailable I mean that I will not
immediately respond to messages.

-- 
CJ van den Berg

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