Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"

[Alan Johnson <alan txtger net>]

> 1) There are a lot of users just connecting and chatting with random 
>    people.
> 
> 2) They might have friends that they all come up with the idea that they
>    want to keep in touch over IM. Better if they all choose Jabber than 
>    they all choosing MSN.
> 
> 3) They might want to get in contact with someone else in GNOME. If they
>    know his Jabber ID they just have to chat away. Sure the person in 
>    GNOME might not use Jabber but some other protocol and then they
>    would have to do as much job as they would have to if they had
>    choosen the wrong protocol from the start.
> 
> Lots of my friends have multiple clients to be able to talk to different
> friends. Quite a few of my friends started with IM just to be able to
> keep in contact with each other. Some happened to choose MSN just
> because it was right there on there machines (these users we want to
> start using Jabber instead).
> 
> GNOME will hopefully often be deployed in company networks where you are
> interested to talk to your collegues. It's better to default to one
> protocol here and we should push for that protocol to be Jabber.

I don't know... it just seems kind of anti-open to push a default on
someone when they have choices and are inherently going to have choices
like that.  I do agree that we should streamline things, but at the same
time marketeer speak like pushing people toward one thing isn't really
something that's a good thing in an open environment.

I think overall we've proven here that there would need to be quite a
bit of thought about interface flow in a new Gnome integrated chat
application, though... which seems like a great thing to me.  I don't
think, though, that pushing the user immediately onto Jabber would be
the least confusing operation for the application.  Perhaps a new user
druid or something so that users who are new and don't know what's going
on will be introduced to jabber is a better option than just having a
hard set default in jabber.  I personally like for people to have
informed choices.

Yours,
Alan

-- 
Alan Johnson <alan txtger net>