[Telepathy] Proposed standard MC API

[Naba Kumar]

Hi Will,

ext Will Thompson wrote:
> For what it's worth, the ability to control the status of groups of
> accounts independently (normally work accounts vs personal accounts) has
> been a frequently-requested feature for Pidgin since it grew the concept
> of global status.
> 
This is something I have always challenged when someone brings up this 
feature. Many IM clients have this, but when you think truly in terms of 
how the world functions, there doesn't seem to be a proper use case and 
it only adds complexity in managing multiple presences.

Everyone has his own idea of what service to use. You can't control what 
your friends want. So you will eventually end up in a situation where 
your work friends are distributed among different services. Same with 
your personal members. There is really no concrete way to ensure all 
your work friends would stay in one service (account A) and relatives in 
another service (account B).

So in that case, "I want my office friends to see me busy, but relatives 
to see me available" no longer works. Setting 'busy' to half of your 
office friends and half or your relatives, and 'available' to other 
halves also does not make sense, of course.

The same can be said about your two accounts in same service (you group 
your office friends and relatives in each account). But that only works 
if everyone uses the same service, which is in real life is not convincing.

The only way it will work out is if you have 4 accounts, 2 in each 
services, and group them as:

Group 1: (service1, account1) + (service2, account1)
Group 2: (service1, account2) + (service2, account2)

This is a very unusual configuration and not anyone is likely to spend 
time setting up. Scale it to multiple services and multiple accounts, 
and you have a nightmare.

So in short there is no real use case for this feature :)

Thanks.

Regards,
-Naba