[ticker-dev] Re: Elvin presence spec draft - request for comments

[Martin at dstc]

Why cant the clients organise the people they are interested in into their
own domain groups.
Automagic is cool but there seems to be no "consitantly reliable" way to
determin that an individual
is in the same domain as our client (us).
Especially when we seem to be abstracting domain to mean a "group" / "team"
/ "bunch of people we are interested in"

Take the fact that sometimes i work at DSTC and sometimes from home and
sometimes at my head office
I change my username/domain to reflect where I am but my work buddies are
only interested in me and could
care less about my domain - except that it gives them some further clue as
to what I'm up to.
Where I am (domain wise) shouldnt automagically restrict the distrubution of
my awareness state.

If a client just see's the name part and stores it in a grouping of  'People
I want aware of my activities'
and if I get an awareness message from someone not in that list I can
(optionally) add them to the list.

I need only look for awareness messages that have my name in them, if the
sender of the notif isnt in my
list I can choose to add them, thereby beginning to notify them of my
awareness states.

I only have to send awareness messages containing the list of people I want
to send awareness stuff to.

The uniqueness of the name is the only problem I can see with this method,
thats why I had a unique name for
each individual which was just like a message_id. If thats so undesirable
there should be other ways.

Although the idea was a little unfriendly - In eChats I wouldnt let the
client log on and emit their username if that username
was already in use, you had to choose another name thats not a real problem
either, cause the name only has to be unique
in the list of 'People I want aware of my activities'


All this being said I havent yet had time to wade through some of the other
protocols,
so probably deserve a spanking for piping up yet again:-)



Martin