[JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

[Al Sutton]

Jens,

I'm planning to do similar clients for slashdot news, and possibly others so
any comments are gratefully received (as well as suggestions for sites to
messagify).

I'm all to aware of the problems of forgetting the ignore command, the
system has an auto response which tells the user how to watch and ignore
release notes if it gets any message it doesn't recognise.

I am, unfortunatley, unable to run a server at alsutton.com, so I can't
offer the xxxxx at alsutton.com option. I was originally looking at having a
xxxxx at software.alsutton.com, but the cost of having a machine on the net to
set up a server is a little prohibitive.

At the moment I'm still in the testing phase, so things may change as time
goes on.

Al.

----- Original Message -----
From: Jens Alfke
To: jdev at jabber.org
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 5:42 PM
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber


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