[Ekiga-list] ekiga community

[arnuld]

> On 7/25/07, Oliver Schinagl <oliver at schinagl.nl> wrote:

> What ekiga is laking is a 'buddy list'. People like that, people want that.
> So what you'd want is incorporate the video/voice capabilities of ekiga
> in to pidgin. Then you have something that has a chance to compete with
> skype. Add a whitelist directory and your good to go.
> 1 client to do it all, thought video/audio with other clients would have
> to be reversed engineerd and shit like that.
> Hey a person can dream right.

i think a better idea will be building a jabber voice-chat client or
adding voice-chat facility to "gajim". we do not need to spend huge
amounts of time to reverse-engineer YAHOO or MSN protocols for
voice-chat. building on an OpenSource  protocol is a much better idea.

i am still not able to get any of my friends switch to Ekiga because
all of them are Windows users and for them (only for them,the Windows
users) it is very much difficult to set up Ekiga, the codecs, the
run-time environment, no buddy list, long start-up times (which
actually is connection time when Ekiga starts up :-)

but i see those users are switching away from YAHOO and Skype to
Google Talk because Google Talk is small in size (just 1.5 MB) and it
does not clutter and it is much easier to set-up + sound quality is
much better.  when new client with features like:

1.) better (or i should say good) sound quality
2.) buddy list (i hate YAHOO way)
3.) less cluttered
4.) a simple design, simple UI  (like Google Talk)
5.) lot less settings/preferences/features


then it will sweep the market like GNOME/KDE did to the Desktp market.
OpenSource protocols are  a much better alternative  than time-sucking
reverse engineering task. people do not want YAHOO, Skype or Google
Talk. they want to talk and i think doing simply this one thing will
be much better target. i also think following the UNIX way - do one
thing and do it well - will  lead to the resolution of problems. we do
not need to add Webcam features and load of other extra
functionalities and eye candy built into the IM. we can just focus on
1 task  --   Voice-Chat client and put our efforts and energy into
that.

BTW, i think Ekiga has one feature that none of the IM have, the audio
codecs for different bandwidth requirements and when everything fails
then Ekiga shines on a much lower bandwidth connection :-)


-- 
http://arnuld.blogspot.com/