-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 There are perhaps a billion or more people in the world who have e-mail access (SMTP). We would like students with XOs to be able to communicate with these people in an easy, sensible way. For this reason, there has been a great deal of interest in e-mail clients for the XO.
Sugar is designed to provide a pervasive identity management system that allows users to handle a visual object representing a particular person in a coherent way across the entire system. Designs are in place for how to chat with a particular friend, or send that person a file, or join a collaborative activity with that friend. The system, as currently designed, fails entirely when faced with users who are not running Sugar. One option is to simply close the system, and demand that any "buddy" in the sugar interface must also be running Sugar. ~ This is not a bad option, but it causes e-mail and other IM services to become distinctly second-class. I can communicate with someone over e-mail, but only if I remember their e-mail address, or keep it in an address book managed by the e-mail activity, not by Sugar. It seems that many people would prefer if non-Sugar users could be integrated into the interface. For example, it has been suggested that Sugar should provide a mechanism for enabling text chat with non-Sugar Jabber users. Clearly, they cannot participate in arbitrary Sugar activities, but perhaps they can send text or files, and stream audio or video. I believe that the Telepathy developers have thought a great deal about integrating with standard Jabber when possible. Although interoperability with standard Jabber is nice, Jabber represents a small number of users compared to AIM or MSN messenger, which are in turn small compared to e-mail. Thus, it seems to me that to make interoperation with non-sugar systems truly useful, we should be able to create buddy objects that represent e-mail addresses, and then communicate text and data with those buddies. My question is: what reasonable technical designs are there, if any, for implementing such pan-protocol buddy support? It seems to me that supporting a wide variety of protocols in Sugar itself would be a disaster. The obvious approach, to me, is to use an XMPP gateway, which provides a virtual Jabber user representing a user on another network. Such gateways are well-established for AIM, MSN, and Yahoo messenger, as well as SIP and SMS, so Jabber integration could potentially provide other protocols for free. However, I cannot determine the state of Jabber proxies for SMTP e-mail. I cannot tell if there yet exists a codebase for a server that would provide a Jabber identity representing an SMTP e-mail address. As a matter of details, there is a tricky problem with e-mail. It is different from traditional IM protocols, because it is always on, even if the user isn't "present". E-mail stores messages and waits for the user to pick them up, and Telepathy's website says "it's less suited for store-and-forward applications like email". Yet this offline-messaging behavior is extremely useful in a school setting. It's even supported by Jabber. I think Sugar needs a design, especially a technical design, for integrating this capability. I don't know how to do it. - --Ben -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIGOtlUJT6e6HFtqQRAqWTAJ4lWjjQKf+SW5Xgf+tPnZvYTDywTQCgghul oOgABTNet6mL/P58xIBhDZY= =U/50 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
