[Psi-Devel] Feature request: Handling of im: URIs

[Jan Vornberger]

Hi there!

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 07:05:38PM -0600, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Jan Vornberger wrote:
> > I believe that permanent, irc-like group chats are one of the killer
> > features of Jabber that set it a side from other instant messaging
> > networks. IRC is a nice thing, but we all now, that it's mostly for
> > geeks. I think, that Jabber has the potential to bring IRC goodness to
> > the mere mortal. :-) That's why I would regard the handling of im: URIs
> > as an important feature to have.
> 
> Just curious: What does the im: URI scheme have to do with persistent
> groupchats?

Oh, I should have made myself more clear here: In my experience the act
of joining a groupchat is actually not that straightforward for the
average newcomer to Jabber. In most clients you are asked for a host
name and a channel name which means you need to understand that
groupchats live on certain conference servers and how that shows up in
its address. It is somewhat of a barrier.

If - instead - the user would be able to simply click on a website on
a link saying 'join our groupchat' and be dropped into that groupchat
without having to worry about where exactly this thing lives, it would
be much more useable. Combined with a more streamlined procedure of
'getting jabber' (and from what I can tell the redesign of jabber.org
seems to take a big step into this direction) I can actually see this
being a viable way for people to set up their own chat room.
I would imagine some community website which tells its members: Get
Jabber (some link) and join our new exciting groupchat (some im: link)!

Just my 2 cents of vision for the Jabber future. :-)

Jan