On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 08:06:10PM +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
[...]
> >No - the real problem is being able to do replies to the correct
> >thread.
>
> Impractical, or impossible, for some interfaces, including SMS. But
> this is okay, this is why we have XMPP user interfaces, and tell
> people to use XMPP clients on their phones. Or email. Or whatever.
>
> Or, maybe there's a really clever classifier handling incoming SMS
> messages and matching them up by subject material to SMS messages
> it's sent the user.
>
> Or maybe someone decides that telling users how to use a bunch of
> cryptic symbols in SMS messages is going to be more fun.
This was my point originally, and I really think it's critical to the
scaling/federation discussion. Imagine email with no subject lines
(and secondarily, with no In-Reply-To header, though I'm given to
believe that there are still people who don't use threaded
mailreaders). Using that to communicate with more than a handful of
people would very quickly become unmanageable.
There's a difference between enforcing a micromessaging format as an
explicit constraint on users for brevity and trying to shoehorn decent
metadata into a message size that's too small to practically support
modern constructs while maintaining compatibility with outdated
applications.
Protocol designers can go far to try to accomodate everyone, but at a
certain point, users have to be punished for trying to fit their
outdated clients into the context of the larger conversation. I'm
willing to bet that the number of people complaining that they can't
get twitter updates on their beepers is small. "Plain" SMS devices
will eventually go the same way.
--
- Adam
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