[ticker-dev] Bots, Presence, Personal Channels, Transient Subscriptions and 'T hread-Id'

[Phillips, Matthew]

> At TickerFest 2001, Matthew Phillips introduced the notion of personal
> channels, which function
> roughly as follows, (Mathew might wish to actually spec this out?)
> 
> A ticker client subscribes to a channel in the form of ( TICKERTAPE ==
> 'foo at bar' )
> where 'foo at bar' is the current users name/domain* pair. 
> 
> To initiate a one on one chat with user 'foo at bar' another 
> person would send
> a message to that channel
> Upon reciept of a notification to a personal channel the 
> client 'foo at bar' is
> using automatically subscribes to the 
> thread-id** contained within the notification with a 
> transient subscription,
> thereby ensuring replies to the message are received locally
> and also ensuring the subscription dies after some predefined 
> period has
> elapsed.	

Just a short clarification: user 'foo at bar' is 'permanently' subscribed to
foo at bar, the person sending the message to them becomes 'thread' subscribed.

I think using personal messaging for bot traffic is a neat idea.  Either
send a personal message to a specific bot eg "phone at bots.dsto" (which you
might spot via presence) or to your own personal group, to which the botd
reply.

Matthew.