[Adium-devl] (no subject)

[Colin Barrett]

On May 10, 2008, at 7:09 PM, Eric Richie wrote:
>
> I REALLY don't like the sound of this.  This would kill usability for
> a great many of our users.  I don't want to turn something as simple
> as twitter into something that (arguably) rivals irc in beginner
> unfriendliness.  I DO NOT want to have to rely on a bunch of commands
> and arguments to interact with the service.  I am unwilling to hand
> something like that to our users.  I realize that most twitter users
> are more tech-savvy than most, but that's not what we're about.  If
> our goal is simplicity and user experience, this would be a very
> precarious path to travel down.  I would like to see what you have,
> but I currently have some apprehension based on what I've heard thus
> far.

OK OK I've been conflating two things here:

The first thing, the thing that I'm talking about, is just the XMPP  
"ui" for Twitter. It isn't built in to Adium at all -- all of the set  
up and such happens through the Twitter website. You don't enter your  
contact information into Adium at all -- you're just IMing the twitter at twitter.com 
  JID from any of your XMPP accounts. Plenty of people use the IM  
interface today. All I'm adding is a little tweak for people who do to  
make it more usable. That's about it. In the future, Twitter may be  
offering a more comprehensive XMPP API based on PubSub, but for now  
they don't.

Secondly thereis a largely separate issue that Zac raised, of wether  
or not we want to include a more "official" Twitter interface (a la  
Facebook IM) in Adium using the Twitter web APIs. I think we might  
want to do something like that once we figure out better what the  
Social Networking experience is going to be, but Twitter is pretty  
different from actual messaging, so we should be careful.

The best suggestion I heard for handling what Zac is talking about is  
a bookmarked group chat, and everyone you're following is in the  
userlist. How that interacts with things like: @replies from people  
who you aren't following, and Direct Messages still needs some  
thought, but it could work.

Does that clear things up?

-Colin