Presence and IntComm WG

["Callahan, Tim" <>]

Who knew mobile groupchat would be useful and popular? (We did -- three years 
ago :o)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/technology/11group.html?_r=2&ref=technology

"Many of the applications seamlessly switch between allowing users to chat 
within the service and via SMS, to accommodate people who do not own 
smartphones and times when participants wander into areas with weak data 
coverage."
--This looks like a small component of our proposed project.  I'd say it 
gives us some validation in our current direction.

"People have noticed that there is a gap in the market...For a lot of people, 
the response is that 'I already like who I know and what I have. I just want 
to talk to my close friends and family.' " 

"Many of the application makers say they are already seeing growth. GroupMe 
says it sends a million text messages each day"

-- It looks like companies keep re-inventing the wheel.  I believe XMPP can 
do everything that is described in the article, while being compatible with 
an existing large user base, etc, etc.  Unfortunately, the industry approach 
is still "proprietary=profitable".
--Tim   



In other *very* geeky news:
I recently stumbled across mcabber, a command line jabber client.  
http://mcabber.com/ (screenshot at the bottom of the homepage); supports 
SASL/SSL/TLS support, MUC, external action triggers; supports modules 
including geolocation, lua, and much more. Packages are aimed at Linux and 
BSD users (including Mac OS X), but I see potential in many other (mobile) 
operating systems and in some of the work we're proposing.  

While looking at mcabber, I also learned about loudmouth:
"Loudmouth is a lightweight and easy-to-use C library for programming with the
Jabber protocol. It's designed to be easy to get started with and yet
extensible to let you do anything the Jabber protocol allows."
https://github.com/mcabber/loudmouth 

Admittedly, I'm not a programmer, but I see how this could be very useful in 
building our new multi-protocol communication bridge (do we have a name for 
our new project yet?)

--Tim