Contacts Are In Roster And Also In Address Book

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Greetings, to one and all!

I gladly greet you, whether you are in my roster or in my address book or neither.

Good news about Convo

It was yesterday, that Mr. Badri Sunderarajan, the developer of the XMPP chat client Convo, has announced that the download count of Convo has surpassed the 101 count in less than a day after he has published Convo at the repository of BananaHackers.

With no advertising nor marketing, and plenty of foreign attempts to restrict XMPP, it is a good display which indicates of the high popularity of XMPP.

This is indeed good news!

A note about adding of contacts

While I was reading the release notes of the release titled "Channels" (Convo 0.1.0), I have further noticed, that there is an even earlier release; it is a pre-release version titled "Early Preview" (Convo 0.1.0-pre1).

I was not certain as to how to interpret the following sentence.

Keep in mind that you will probably want an extra client to do "advanced" things like adding a new contact.

The XMPP roster has benefits

While the benefits of adding a contact and consequently subscribe to a contact on the XMPP network allows to observe the status of the contact (e.g. online, chatty, away and extended away) and status messages, which may also include music titles of the music that the contact is currently listening to, and even further includes moods and even activities.

XEP-0107: Contact Mood

XEP-0108: Contact Activity

The added benefits of the features that are exposed by subscribing to a contact on XMPP are definitely useful, namely for contacts of people that you are either constantly or physically interacted with (i.e. in "real life").

Otherwise, that information is distracting and you would not want to have that contact in your roster, as it would not be productive.

A practice which I advocate

To realize the productivity matter, I will describe one of my recent communications.

For example, in the last period of month, I have been contantly in contact with Kris of JoinJabber, who is guiding my efforts towards a new introduction and publishing system for XMPP (JabberCard);

Both of us, are in direct contact for over three months, and non of us has ever added the other counterpart to his roster nor shared his subscription with the other, respectively.

Nevertheless, I did save the XMPP contact of Kris to my address book, and I have also saved the XMPP address of the group chat JoinJabber to my address book too.

This is the entry which is saved in my computer as filename joinjabber.vcf.

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
FN:JoinJabber General Chat
ORG:JoinJabber
TITLE:An inclusive space on the Jabber network
URL:https://joinjabber.org
NOTE:A landing place for the open federated Jabber community.
X-XMPP;TYPE=MUC:xmpp:chat@joinjabber.org?join
END:VCARD

This matter also applies for channels (PubSub nodes) and group chats.

moparisthebest has said...

I agree, I would go further and say that presence is an antiquated concept that has no place in modern messaging.

"whether someone is currently online" mattered a ton in 1999 when people would not get your message at all if you sent it when people were offline.

Today, people will get it whenever they want to get it, and will respond when they want to respond, hence presence is a completely useless concept.

I would not categorically determine that presence is a completely useless concept, as it has its advantages by knowing when a friend is busy, and it is also useful when engaging with automated software over XMPP (e.g. news bots).

Conclusion

I maintain a roster which does not exceed 50 contacts.

Most of my roster contacts are:

  • Family

  • Local friends

  • Frequent contacts

  • Current associates

  • Sports companions

And my address book currently has over 3,500 addresses which mostly includes emails, IRC addresses and telephone numbers, and with over 800 contacts with XMPP addresses.

The interactive benefits of the XMPP roster are useful to the highest extent in history of instant messaging, and yet, as already mentioned, adding contacts to the XMPP roster is mostly useful when those contacts are of your family, friends, local community members, associates and colleagues of your work and of your joint sports activities.

Other than those and, perhaps, other types that I might have neglected to mention, use an address book as a mean to store addresses of contacts.

Best regards,

Schimon

Appendix

People who I collaborate and communicate with on a weekly basis, without sharing presence. We even communicate via VoIP.

And others...