Addressbook and XMPP roster
Contacts are in roster, and also in address book.
Not all of your XMPP contacts should be in your roster.
Greetings, to one and all!
I gladly greet you, whether you are in my roster or in my address book or neither in my roster nor in my address book.
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!
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.
Roster
The XMPP roster has benefits.
While the benefits of adding a contact and consequently subscribing to a contact presence over the XMPP network allows to observe the status of the contact (e.g. online, chatty, busy, 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.
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").
It is also useful for advertizing activities of services that are offered over XMPP.
In other cases, when it is not required, that information is distracting and you would not want to have contacts that you do not need to have in your roster, as it would be overwhelming and not productive.
Offline
A practice which I advocate.
This is the entry which is saved in my computer as filename `slixfeed.vcf`.
BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 FN:Slixfeed News Bot ORG:Schapps TITLE:Slixfeed syndication news bot URL:https://schapps.woodpeckersnest.eu/slixfeed/ NOTE:Slixfeed is a syndication news bot for XMPP. X-XMPP;TYPE=MUC:xmpp:slixfeed@chat.woodpeckersnest.space?join END:VCARD
This concern also applies for channels (PubSub nodes) and group chats.
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
- XMPP based online services and software
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...