On Sun Aug 15 12:21:15 2010, Candide Kemmler wrote:
I'm very interested in the PEP xep, in particular in combination
with the User Activity XEP. However, I have a few remarks about the
specification as it is. Also, maybe it is just me, but I can't seem
to find any meaningful implementation of PEP among existing clients
and servers. The best I could do is with tigase and psi: I enabled
the "Publish tunes" in the psi client and I could indeed see that
the xml was pushed to another client in the XML console. But that's
about it: an XML message in a debugging console. I think pep is
pretty cool and I wonder why it's not given a bit more attention
from implementors.
I think it depends on the client. I personally find Gajim is doing
very well here, publishing and displaying information as the "rich
presence" it was intended to be.
Now to my remarks:
First off, it is my feeling that providing a fixed activity list,
even if it can be supplemented by way of a catch-all <other/>
category, is very arbitrary and that many people might feel very
reluctant to log their activities as dictated by a such an
authoritative list. Further organizing that list in a two-level
hierarchy is also very constraining: why wouldn't people want to
organize their activities in much deeper hierarchies? I had a look
at onesocialweb's attempt to use activitystreams for that, but that
format seems to be bound to the same limitations.
I think "machine readable" is the constraint here. If you've an
alternate form that manages to provide machine processing and yet
allows greater expressivity, this would be interesting. Since I gave
up, I no longer have the major problem of not being able to say I'm
drinking beer *and* having a smoke, though, so I'm not so concerned...
Now to something more important: as I understand it publishing
activities is an all-or-nothing option: subscribers can optionally
filter out activities they are not interested in, but I cannot
myself choose which activities I'd like to share with a specific
friend or group of friends. That's too bad: I was thinking of
activities as a way to share statistics - sports statistics for
example, and I don't want to potentially bother everyone with these
statistics (or force them to filter them out). Another use would be
for me to share some bad habit, like alcool, smoking or drug use
for example, while seeking support from a (potentially anonymous)
group of people who share the habit. In that case, I obviously
wouldn't even want others to know that I have that kind of
behaviour.
Well, the activity node *can* be filtered out to only specific
people, but it's not often a feature available in the server -
changing the access model and configuration of the PEP node will
allow this.
It won't, however, allow anonymous activity information - for that,
you really need to send the events via some anonymizing system, like
a MUC.
I'd also note that specialized information really means a specialized
client (or rather, one that understands the PEP node you're trying to
use), and PEP makes that easy to do.
My third remark is on statistics: aside from the type of activity,
there's a lot of additional info that users are likely to be
wanting to track, if they bother to log their activity in the first
place: let's mention: duration of an exercising session, amount
spent on a meal, title of book being read, etc... It would be great
to allow people to add such information.
I don't think there's anything preventing you from adding extra
information there, except that you may well not want to receive all
that information.
I do quite like the notion of advertising the book I'm reading, for
instance, but I wouldn't put that in User Activity, I'd put that
somewhere else - much like User Tune isn't bundled into Activity.
Dave.
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