[JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

[Jens Alfke]

On Thursday, May 24, 2001, at 03:56 PM, al at alsutton.com wrote:

> If you send a message to personalbuddy at jabber.com saying "watch xxxxx" 
> where xxxxx is the name of the package to watch it will send you 
> notification of updates. If you send "ignore xxxxx" it will stop 
> sending them.

I love the idea of presence/IM based services like this, but I'm worried 
that we're going to get into a real mess where they're all driven by 
text messages using various different syntaxes ... which is of course 
exactly what happened in the e-mail world with list servers. (I just 
read a news article yesterday about a new AIM based agent for Radiohead 
fans that sounds like it's running some kind of Eliza-like "natural 
language" interface. Be very afraid.)

In the case of your personalbuddy, I can easily see people later 
deciding they don't want the notifications anymore but not being able to 
remember the magic "ignore" command. They'd then get mad at the agent 
for spamming them.

Wouldn't it be cleaner to use the existing Jabber subscription model for 
this rather than inventing your own? I.e. you subscribe to 
"xxxxx at alsutton.com"'s status and it will send you messages when xxxxx 
is updated. To stop getting updates, unsubscribe. (The status message in 
the presence could indicate the current version number.)

Of course this requires that you run your own Jabber server at 
alsutton.com, which you might not be willing or able to do. Is it 
possible in Jabber to subscribe to a single resource? If so, then 
perhaps people could subscribe to "personalbuddy at jabber.com/xxxxx" to 
get notifications for package xxxxx.

—Jens
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