I am starting to enjoy Empathy and the features it now offers. Remote desktop being the most important. Not having to worry about Network Address Translation or router configuration in general makes Ubuntu people able to help other Ubuntu people easily. Even newbies helping newbies Talk about a receipie for success. With Yuuguu you have to setup another account and install one more annoying application. Yuuguu almost is as bad as Skype for this, both default to automatically boot when your computer starts. Mind you they both aren't as bad as MSN that you can't remove from your start-up process. Mind you most people who use M$ programs don't worry about quick boot times. Many features of the popular chat clients (Yahoo, AIM, MSN) are not available in the alternative clients. And implementing them is not only difficult, but the companies would/will try to prevent this via technical and/or legal means. That is why I stick to Empathy. I find, it is better to encourage people to stick to the standards (jabber/voip) and make them easier to use. Maybe even integrate Pidgin/Kopete/Empathy with Ekiga or some other voip client to make this happen with standard protocols. Open Instant Messaging has been in dark ages for quite a few years. It is time for it to be opened up like email was 15 years ago. Join gmail.com or other domains that federate with Google and lets get Instant Messaging on the road to usefulness.
As for supporting the additional features in MSN/AIM such as voice calls and video and what not is a wast of time IMHO, because you would need to reverse engineer much of it only to have them change the specs to cut you off. The solution to that problem is making them work with Wine. So if you absolutely want/need proprietary stuff you can use the original program.
No comments:
Post a Comment