TITLE: Fallback Messaging
AUTHOR: Philip S Tellis
COMPANY: I'm a geek

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How do you chat?
- Which IM programs do you use?
- How many accounts on each?
- Do you communicate with the same people over multiple services?
- How often do you use email/SMS to communicate with these people?
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Does the server decide whether you can chat or not?
- How often has a service gone down for maintenance while you're in a conversation?
- What happens to your conversation?
- What happens to your train of thought?
- What happens to logs of the conversation - if any?
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- Do you know your friends by their names or their handles?
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Act 1, Scene 1, Take 1
- Philip and Manish are chatting on MSN about their project
- MSN server goes down
- Start Y!M, continue conversation
- Net goes down, only email working
- Send email/SMS saying that we can't chat anymore
- Philip combines all the logs to post to the website
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The idea behind fallback messaging 
- People care about people, not protocols
- Conversations should not be service dependent
- Conversation should be continuous even if the service changes
- Person-person messaging approaches pc-pc messaging
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So what does fallback messaging do?
- Automatically pick a protocol to use for messaging
- Automatically switch protocols if one goes down without worrying the user
- A single log file irrespective of protocol
- Represent a person as a single entity rather than a bunch of different handles
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What's needed?
- A single client that talks multiple protocols
- The client should group different accounts of a contact into a single entity
- The client should be able to switch between accounts
- Perhaps an ability to prioritise the order of fallback
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Act 1, Scene 1, Take 2
- Philip and Manish are chatting on MSN about their project
- MSN server goes down
- The client switches to Y!M
- Net goes down, only email working
- Client switches to email/sms
- User is notified that he's now in async mode
- The client has a combined log of everything communicated
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Can we do this today?
- FOSS clients like gaim and ayttm can do it, though they might still need some work
- FOSS clients have the edge
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Do we really need it?
- Probably in very few situations, but we sure want it :P
- Data transfer over IM is an application
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The future of IM
- Everyone's talking about IM interoperability
- Sending structured data and not just human readable conversations over IM
- IM transports as a commodity with value added services above it
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Contact:
- Philip S Tellis<br>
philip.tellis AT gmail.com<br>
http://bluesmoon.blogspot.com/
- Uses <a href="http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/">Eric A Meyer's S5</a>
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