Stop Your Yammerin'
Aug. 19th, 2005 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljpliceaseOne of the dumb things about The Company is that instead of using an open
instant messaging protocol like Jabber they implemented their own. I
actually talked to the guys who did the initial work on our cruddy little
instant messenger while I was still in school, before I started with
The Company. It wasn't a bad prototype, it just should never have been
productized the way that it was.
One of the idiosyncrasies of the IM protocol that we use is that when you open a talk window to someone else, it contacts the recipient's client software to open a connection. I am not exactly sure why it does this, but I can think of a couple of good technical reasons one might choose to do that.
It is possible for your client therefore to tell when someone has opened a chat window with you. The default client doesn't do anything with this information, but I use a different client, one that supports multiple protocols [1] and one of the options is to have this client I use preemptively open a chat window before the other party can even complete typing their first message. This means I can say "Hi" before they even get to say anything, and they get creeped out by my psychic-ness.
It's a neat trick, but I don't always employ it, because like any trick, if over used it can bore easily. Here is the thing though. Sometimes people will open up a window to talk to me and then not even type anything into it [2]. Now I'm getting creeped out.
[1] I have friends on AIM, Yahoo IM and MSN Messenger, so having a unified IM client is a necessity.
[2] Our IM protocol also lets the other party know when you are typing.
One of the idiosyncrasies of the IM protocol that we use is that when you open a talk window to someone else, it contacts the recipient's client software to open a connection. I am not exactly sure why it does this, but I can think of a couple of good technical reasons one might choose to do that.
It is possible for your client therefore to tell when someone has opened a chat window with you. The default client doesn't do anything with this information, but I use a different client, one that supports multiple protocols [1] and one of the options is to have this client I use preemptively open a chat window before the other party can even complete typing their first message. This means I can say "Hi" before they even get to say anything, and they get creeped out by my psychic-ness.
It's a neat trick, but I don't always employ it, because like any trick, if over used it can bore easily. Here is the thing though. Sometimes people will open up a window to talk to me and then not even type anything into it [2]. Now I'm getting creeped out.
[1] I have friends on AIM, Yahoo IM and MSN Messenger, so having a unified IM client is a necessity.
[2] Our IM protocol also lets the other party know when you are typing.
