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!
Filed under: email, messaging, sphere
It’s now common knowledge that Mozilla wants to do an overhaul of Thunderbird. As for the progress they have thus far in fixing email and messaging, it’s too soon to tell. Don’t think I am a Thunderbird hater, I actually use it to manage my Gmail accounts when I’m on my laptop. However, my personal opinion is that you can’t fix email (and clients for that matter) if they aren’t broken.
Gmail as a web-based client is really nice, I must say. I’ve never really used Microsoft Outlook (except in college) so I can’t really voice my opinion on that. Evolution mail was nice considering Ubuntu integrated it into their desktop edition, but it was lacking in many areas, including the lack of Gmail support. Given the fact that the Thunderbird project is now being headed by Mozilla Messaging, could this mean that in the future, IM is incorporated into their email client? That has yet to be seen, but it’s beginning to look that way, considering the vision statement on the official website and news items like this. Funny thing is, there is this quote of interest:
“We’d like Thunderbird to do searches across common archives and have a better focal point and search system,” said Asher.
We are already there with the wonders of SupraSearch.
Now, the beauty of SS is the amazing *fanfare* email capabilities. Not only is SS an email client, but it is also mail server as well. Having this ability makes it that much easier to set up custom rules for mailing lists, automatic forwarding, and you can even forward mail into different spheres. The idea is that you can set it up to forward any message created in a sphere to forward either to all contacts, all members, or specific other email addresses. The cool thing about that is that when people reply, the reply will go directly into the sphere. It’s sort of like a shared “Sent Mail”, where all members of a sphere can see the sent mail at the same time, and when the person replies, it will show up in the sphere in real-time for all members to see. Attachments are easy to send, also enabling saving documents directly to the server. Interestingly, SS auto-converts all office documents to PDF format to make them fully searchable.
It just goes to show we do messaging differently.
Filed under: blogging, bookmarks, commenting, messaging, sphere
It’s ironic in a way to be using SS to write about it. However, it kind of serves as a practical application of SS’s uses.
Like any typical article that gets written, there is a planning stage. So, usually that begins with a startup of SupraSphere. I have a sphere set up called “Supra Blog Team” which is where I usually post ideas for the next couple of posts. David will usually refine the ideas via terse. After I have a set topic to write about, I *usually* will write a message outline, which I’ve not really gotten into yet with the posts here, but that’s going to be the next one. Commenting on it, it will receive some tweaks, and then I will start the writing process.
From right within SS, I’ll hit <crtl-t> which just like Firefox, opens a new tab, and I log into the blog and start writing. I should mention here that Wordpress is fully functional while in SS as well. Extra tabs also mean it’s easy to search for more information so I can flesh out ideas.
After I get a rough draft, I save the preliminary version, and preview it in another tab. Using the bookmark feature, I then post the bookmark in the Blog Team sphere. David will read it from there, and then using the comment feature to tweak it some more, editing it for grammar and the like. Then, finally, I’ll get the green light to click on “Publish” and another post goes live.
Posted on March 11th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
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