IM and Presence history

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 





John C Klensin wrote:
--On Friday, 24 November, 2006 10:30 -0500 Eric Burger
<eburger@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Or, the reality that with (at the time) a single dominant
network provider made the inter-networking point moot.

Eric, you are being a little cryptic, perhaps unintentionally.
What do you mean about a single dominant provider and at what
time?
I would add an observation to Dave's about possibly different
sets of needs by reminding everyone that considerable IM
functionality (other than presence) isn't new.  We had
SEND/SOML/SAML from the beginning of SMTP, even though they had,

Just to nit-pick, since Internet history has become an important topic:

By "beginning of SMTP" John actually means the mid-1970s, in the original Arpanet FTP-based mail service.

And since I think it was a particularly clever option, I'll note that one of the commands John cites was "deliver to the recipient's screen if they are logged in and deliver it to their mailbox if they aren't."

Would be nice to have that in today's world, wouldn't it?


None of these supported a presence mechanism in the sense that
we understand it today.

There as a close approximation, as I recall, with the way the Finger mechanism was implemented at some sites. You would Finger a particular username at a host and the returned information would tell you if they were logged in.


 As a result, one had to bind a user
identity to a target host in much the way SMTP does, rather than
having someone attach to the network at any point and announce
presence and, implicitly, location.

Mumble. I'd claim that the current presence mechanisms do the same thing that was done originally.

If I came in through an arpanet dial-up at some random place on the net, and telneted to my home system, then the finger for that home system would show me as 'present'. I am not seeing how today's presence systems are fudamentally different from that.


 It is arguably those
presence and mobility mechanisms and not IM itself that is the
recent development.  To the degree to which those mechanisms are
what caused IM to take off, perhaps that reinforces Dave's view
of different services serving different needs.

I think it was Graham Klyne who pointed out to me that IM and Internet Mail also do tradeoffs in reliability vs. timeliness.

An IM is not expected to survive a system crash, whereas an email is. That leads to very different software development decisions, such as whether to incur the cost of a write-to-disk for every message. In the aggregate, the cost difference can be huge.

d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

_______________________________________________

Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]