2008/4/9, Norman Rasmussen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 7:10 PM, Sander Devrieze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > 4) When closed network contacts try to send you a file they can get an > > unfriendly technical error message like "Your client does not support > > webdav file transfers. Contact <owner of the network> for more > > information." > > > > This is bad. If anything it's _more_ important to make it work the other > way around, so that if someone sends you a file you can receive it, but if > they ask you to send them a file, you can do it via email. Actually, any > error message is bad - it should 'just-work'
This is not bad. For the Aunt Tilly user using the XMPP client it should just work. If Aunt Tilly can do everything with all her contacts whether or not they are on a closed network, the XMPP client will be Ok. If she can't send a file, the client will suck. The other way around is not that important: when the Aunt Tilly user using the closed network client can't send a file to a contact behind a transport, this is no problem at all for the XMPP community. This Aunt Tilly will think the closed network client she is using sucks (e.g. MSN Messenger) and she may start looking for something more reliable when this happens often. Of course this will happen more often when more of her contacts start using an XMPP client and a transport (network effects as judo strategy). Example discussion between 2 Aunt Tilly users. Tilly1 uses Coccinella to connect to MSN. Tilly1 does not know Coccinella is called an XMPP or Jabber client. Tilly1 only knows it's a tool with which she can chat with Tilly2. Tilly2 is using Windows Live Messenger, the official client of the closed MSN network. Tilly2 also does not know anything about computers. Tilly2 tries to send a file to Tilly1. The transport between the Tillies sends an unfriendly, geekly error message back to Tilly2 that she for sure will not understand. Tilly2 chats to Tilly1 that she tried to send a file and that it did not worked. Tilly1 replies that she never had problems with sending files with her chat tool. Tilly1 says she will try to send a file to Tilly2 to test. The file transfer works! Hence, Tilly2 gets interested in the chat tool of Tilly1 and asks Tilly1 how it's called and where she can get it. Tilly2 switches to Coccinella and also will start using the MSN transport. Now there is 1 additional user which will increase the number of similar issues (also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law ). More and more people on the MSN network using the official Windows Live Messenger client will get reliability issues with file transfers. In this way, thanks to the MSN transport and people using it, Windows Live Messenger gets a reputation of being unreliable. In contrast, more and more people who switched to an XMPP client without knowing they are using an XMPP client will be happy about their new IM software as it never has trouble with file transfers. XMPP clients will get a better reputation and word of mouth recommendations will do the rest. -- Mvg, Sander Devrieze.
