[Telepathy] Rich presence

[Robert McQueen]

Jiri Baum wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Mikhail Zabaluev:
>> I'd like to have a discussion on extended presence support in Telepathy.
> ...
>> Any ideas?
> 
> One question is where the boundary ought to be drawn between extended presence 
> in telepathy and a tubes-based social networking application. Essentially, 
> that's the extreme point of rich presence.

It's generally the intention of the Telepathy spec to be able to deal
with things which are likely to be somehow supported in the protocol of
various IM protocols. So, stuff like mail notification, video/voice
calling, formatted text, embedded images, geolocation, mood reporting,
user events (buzz/smack/prang/whatever), file transfer, vector scribbles
and voice clips are all "in scope" and I'd hope to be able to support
them all one day... :)

> A social networking application could also do things like only revealing some 
> information to some subset of contacts. Even with geographic location, one 
> might not wish to broadcast stalking-quality data to all contacts...

This is a legitimate concern indeed. Where protocols support such
behaviour, it should be exposed in the relevant Telepathy interfaces
somehow. Thinking of XMPP's GeoLoc XEP, the preferred implementation
mechanism is PEP, which by default exposes the information to people who
are allowed to see your presence. Daf and I were planning in our little
geolocation hack (Telepathy + Gypsy + libjana's world map widget,
unfortunately we didn't finish it, and there aren't very many servers
with PEP support anyway...) to allow the user to choose a precision to
which they wanted their position reported (eg "Precicely", "Nearest
1km", "Nearest 100km").

> Once such an application exists, which for now it doesn't, the pressure to put 
> such extended data directly into a telepathy extended presence will probably 
> diminish.

Perhaps, but I don't want to see tubes turning into a reason for
Telepathy to not support reasonable protocol features. It's just
intended to be a mechanism that an application author can re-use or
simplify the creation of a collaborative application protocol, and to
let Telepathy take care of the networking and finding contacts. Where
it's necessary to interoperate with other clients on the same protocol,
adding things to the Telepathy spec should always take precedence over
using Tubes.

> Jiri

Regards,
Rob