[OWW-Discuss] Chat

[Ilya Sytchev]

One potentially useful side-effect of using a "real" chat back-end (IRC 
or Jabber/XMPP) is the ability to exchange files directly - may be 
useful for sending those huge microscope images to collaborators in 
close-to-real time, etc.

Ilya

Bryan Bishop wrote:
> On Sunday 10 February 2008, "Bill F" <bill.altmail at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is a good suggestion but we currently have no Internet support
>> for any protocols besides HTTP on our server. In other words, we run
>> with a pretty well locked-down firewall.
> 
> That's okay. Another temporary service can be used, such as freenode, 
> which hosts IRC channels for example. You mention Jabber and other chat 
> services, and unfortunately I can't cite any free chat hosting services 
> there (and I don't remember if Jabber allows for chatrooms - I'm sure 
> it does. I'll go ask jer.)
> 
>> When we recently opened up a tiny hole to allow people to send
>> feedback messages, we were immediately beset with spam. Supporting a
>> new protocol like IRC would have to be a decision we'd make as a
>> group and not on the spur of the moment.
> 
> Freenode has configuration settings that lets them avoid lots of spam, 
> and for the most part websites do not tend to get a lot of spam. 
> There's a way that we can run some bots in the background to kick 
> spammers out, and if necessary I'll nominate myself to set up such a 
> bot and run it from one of my servers.
> 
>> Our current chat is javascript and browser-based; it really consumes
>> a lot of resources. I agree that moving away from it is a good idea.
> 
> Woah. :)
> 
>> I'm also personally reluctant to embrace IRC when so many people seem
>> to be moving to more sophisticated chat servers and services. As a
> 
> IRC is just generally a good idea. Also, I do not mind if it's not an 
> official chat medium. Anybody that wants to join me for chat can log on 
> to irc.freenode.net channel #openwetware.  (Heh. Looks like Dan is 
> already there.)
> 
>> matter of fact, I'd suspect that most of our users, not generally
>> being of the computer science variety, would favor something like
>> Jabber, something that's compatible with Google Talk, Apple iChat,
>> and IBM's SameTime. It's also supported by many other chat clients.
> 
> Re: Jabber. Looks like there's an extra service-daemon to download.
> http://www.jabber.org/user/userguide/#groupchat
> -- but at least Jabber lets you hook in other IM protocols. :)
> 
>> The Jabber and XMPP specs are the only real "standards" out there. I
> 
> True.
> 
>> know that IRC is pretty open but there's no major network that
>> directly supports it. XMPP and Jabber are  pretty much the same
>> protocol at this point and therefore the most likely to be with us in
>> the future. There's  good deal of work going on to merge voice, text,
>> and video chat via XMPP. I'd love to be convinced otherwise. Show us
>> the data and the context of the data and we can evaluate it.
> 
> It does indeed seem to be the emerging open way of doing communication.
> 
> - Bryan
> ________________________________________
> Bryan Bishop
> http://heybryan.org/
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