Most Wanted: Smart IM

Filed under: open source, sphere

I have become accustomed to using Pidgin for managing my incredibly long IM list. It’s alright for the most part, although it’s lacking in a few departments. Currently file transfer in Yahoo Messenger is broken, well, (I have heard that MSN does work, but I never use it) it seems like all file transfer is broken. Audio and Video Messaging in AIM and Yahoo does not function either.

Yes I know, it seems like I have a lot to complain about, but one thing I really love about Pidgin is the capability to set one icon and one status for all running accounts. Generally I have three running at any given time, Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM, with the occasional Jabber account running. Naturally I have it set to logging all messages and statuses, as well as logging my contacts as when they were “last seen” in military time. Plus, who doesn’t love to chat it up on #ubuntu-forums? Pidgin supports IRC too.

Now, I have yet to get my hands on the web version of SS, but from what I understand, a lot of things I’ve been wanting are coming true. However, this is not about what’s going on with the web development. This is about what I’d like to see in the web version. :)

SS is cross-platform as we all know, so having a truly cross-platform, fully compatible, richly featured IM client would be awesome. But, as we also know, SS is not an IM client. Wouldn’t it be cool though to be able to use SS and its IM feature to communicate with other clients though?

How would it work? In the not so distant future, users of the web-based or the software-based client would be able to open a context specific “social sphere” dedicated to only IM. Using some sort of invite feature, one could invite others to link with them in this sphere and regardless of the protocol used (whether it be AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or what have you) users could message their contacts. However, as a user of SS, we’d be able to use it full-featured with the terse messaging, whereas the non-SS users would see every message in the standard view for their client.

What I think would be really outstanding is if there were some way to incorporate voice and/or video into SS, as a more intuitive (and furthermore a multi-platform) version of Skype, Wengo, or even iChat. Voice chat and video conferencing seems to be the new wave for social networking, although many corporations have been pioneering this venture for years now. First hand I know JCPenney uses real-time and on-demand video conferencing and training for associates as well as supervisors and managers, and I have an educated guess that other “fine retailers” do the same. It certainly is not new, but being able to bring this to people not associated with big business would be a big benefit to the whole communication scene.

Myspace has introduced it’s Myspace/Skype IM client in recent history, and although I don’t use Myspace, many of my contacts do and conveniently beg me to install it. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to function under Linux, even with Wine, because for some reason I have a general loathing for all things Myspace. However, the way I understand it, Skype communicates with the Myspace client, so some of my brave friends will Skype me. I’m really hoping Facebook would implement something like this…

There are many more ideas and hypothetical new features that I plan on discussing as a weekly feature. However, I’d love to hear your input on what you’d like to see in the web-client or the software-client. Send me an email, IM me, or more importantly, leave a comment for everyone to read!