Why I Hate "Modern" IM

There are few things I dislike about "modern" instant messaging. I really do miss the days of old, when IM was text only and the most complicated thing we had to worry about was emoticon display and whether ICQ's or AIM's protocols were going to change while we slept. Yahoo was a joke, MSN was an afterthought, Pidgin was still known by its former name and still used GTK+ 1.2.x, and a few disgruntled people would decide to fork on occasion. Even emoticon display wasn't that important--the focus was communication by a faster method than e-mail.

I, like many of my generation, discovered "web mail" and then graduated into more advanced things that this magical "internet" had to offer. Quickly, I started using e-mail for communication purposes instead of random notifications that were overall meaningless. Thankfully, my school's internet service provider offered a way to have students and teachers each have their own e-mail address. When one of my classes required a school-sanctioned e-mail address, I was assigned the 354th e-mail address issued to my school. The ISP used an HP-UX machine for mail. With trusty old telnet and the MacOS Classic application BetterTelnet FAT as our new best friends, we would log into the mail host (omalp1; I'll let the obsessed among you see if you can figure out the rest of the hostname even though it doesn't exist anymore--good luck!) and be presented with a shell. None of us had any clue about UNIX in those days, so we knew of only two commands, pine and exit, and these were taught to us as the only "blessed" commands to use at the "dollar sign thingy."

My classmates and I started using e-mail to communicate both in and out of classes. At some point I finally got dialup internet access at home, albeit absolute trash, and joined in. We used this e-mail like it was IM--we would religiously check our e-mail and reply as soon as we received the other person's message. This worked pretty well until someone among us discovered ICQ. Soon we all used it. Ah, this brings back the memories. Mirabilis' official ICQ 98b client, as I recall, was my first ICQ client. I don't recall if emoticons worked at this stage or not; I don't believe I ever used them at that point. Some time later, an AOL user among us discovered that AIM and AOL's built-in messaging component could talk to each other. A few of us migrated to AIM, but most of us ran both AIM and ICQ together. All was still good with the world. AIM 3.x, with all the neat little back doors to get around AOL users being able to be invisible to AIM users, was the client of choice. Basic HTML formatting, emoticons, sounds that didn't drive us crazy when we got messages. Ah, these were the days. I miss it!

At some point later, IM started to go down hill. Someone decided that file transfer needed to be a first-class citizen in client features. Yahoo grew webcam support. MSN became a contender despite its stupid design (I'll come back to this). Third-party clients actually became useful and welcome, especially the multiprotocol variety. And the spiral continued.

Today, we have a disaster area of IM features that everyone demands of every client, even the ones without the resources to develop and provide such features. Yahoo has more file transfer methods than I care to count, and changes them about as frequently as necessary to irritate the crap out of third-party client developers. MSN has enough file transfer methods to make AIM's newly increased three-count look like a fledgling effort. I won't even speculate on how many methods other protocols have or bother to find out how many XEP's exist for file transfer over XMPP. The exact numbers here are all irrelevant--the point is that we have a landfill full of code to cope with these bajillion file transfer methods and scenarios.

Webcam support comes to mind next. Suddenly these USB camera devices exploded onto the market and now everyone had to be able to use them in their IM clients. Then came the wave of "You don't have a webcam? Why do you bother to be online?" from those so addicted to their webcams that textual communication seemed like the stone age. Every IM provider that implements this is hell-bent on world domination or something and decides to pick protocols that are completely different from the "competitors' products," eliminating any hope of sane interoperability between these features of the services. Some of these protocols provide features others don't. Users blindly used whatever was thrust in front of them. Pornographic use of the webcam appeared. Stupidity ensued, while valid uses of the webcam, such as family communication and distance learning, didn't become major factors until far later in the game.

As if webcam support wasn't bad enough, some morons in MSN's management and development ranks decided they needed to introduce custom emoticons, winks, and nudges. Custom emoticons, of course, allow any user to send any random image to replace any specified text. MSN being the world of frequent abuse (again I'll come back to the abomination that is MSN later), users quickly took advantage of this and soon we had users replacing literally all of their commonly-typed text with obscure, crappy multicolored flashing emoticon crap that should never have existed in the first place.

Enter the nudge, now. Nudge a user and cause whatever stupid effect in the official client. Suddenly it too was all the rage for no real reason. Somewhere along the line Yahoo introduced a similar feature called buzz that shakes the message window. This too was hotly demanded. And let's not forget about the winks. Flash objects, I believe they were. More crap that doesn't belong in IM. Seriously, take this stuff to poorly-designed personal web pages, or even MySpace, and keep it out of IM.

And MSN as a whole. What a wonderful disaster area. When MSNP2 was around, I suppose I could excuse the lack of a status message--after all, ICQ didn't have them for a good many years either. But I won't excuse it--AIM had user-definable away messages from the beginning of my recollection, although available messages and invisibility are relatively recent additions by comparison. To me this negates any valid reason for MSN not to have supported some sort of status message. Then we have the friendly name, which I swear was invented solely to give users something not to use, but to abuse in ways unimaginable to those who implemented it. The ability to have graphical emoticons render in the friendly name comes to mind. So does the use of the friendly name to compensate for the lack of status messages. By this point, the protocol's usage had devolved into a cesspool anyway, so who really cared about the addition of custom emoticons, winks, and nudges, right? Apparently someone thought so, because now we have all that crap on top of it.

Now it's too late in the game, but MSN decided to implement another new feature--Personal Status Messages. Wow, now MSN joins the ranks of sane IM protocols, right? Not quite. The PSM now gets abused almost as badly as the friendly name is. I submit that it's called a "personal status message" for a reason, and that the reason is not to provide another field for users to abuse. But, as I said, it's too late in the game now. Users don't change unless you force them to, and this feature-too-late-to-really-matter certainly doesn't give us any evidence with which to claim that users change.

If I haven't alienated everyone who would bother to read this post by now, those reading this far are probably wondering what relevance this has to Pidgin or the Purple Plugin Pack, given my repeated prior related postings about both. Well, it's relatively complicated.

A couple years ago, long before our renaming fiasco started, Pidgin had a contributor who was submitting pretty large chunks of code to our MSN support. I wasn't around much for this; I was mostly just a user at this point and hadn't even attempted to contribute yet. Somewhere along the line, communications broke down, frustrations came into play, like probably a million other things I don't know or care about right now did. The bottom line is that the patch sat and the contributor left.

Fast forward to now and look at Pidgin's MSN support. No one can look at it and say with any seriousness that we support MSN features well--granted, we do a decent job but we don't support status messages and still use MSNP9. After two Google Summer of Code projects, we have an MSNP14 protocol plugin, but it was merged into our main development line too soon and still isn't ready for general consumption. As a result of this, we still ship MSNP9 and disable MSNP14 by default. We have a new Crazy Patch Writer who has implemented some elements of MSNP15 support. If and when any of this new MSN code becomes release-ready is really anybody's guess. (Not trying to slight anyone here; stabilizing new protocol support is work.)

The same contributor I mentioned earlier has now returned with a fork of the MSN protocol plugin for libpurple. He implemented server-side alias storage and some parts of the MSN peer-to-peer file transfer methods. Near as I can tell from the mailing list discussions, this is all still our existing MSNP9 stuff with some modifications. All fine and well, I suppose, but really these patches should have been submitted to us for review before forking, in my opinion.

In the ensuing discussions over the forked protocol plugin, the Personal Status Message issue has come up again, and there seems to be a difference of opinion on what the intended use of such a status message is. One side of the debate insists that this message has nothing to do with status but is instead for advertisements that allegedly are completely unrelated to status. The other side, which I find myself firmly rooted in the ranks of, argue that this PSM is a status message and ought to be treated as such. It seems the battle lines are clearly drawn for a war over how to implement this stuff.

All in all, I come back to the simple statement--I hate "modern" IM with a passion. I want to return to the days when there were no graphical emoticons, no webcams, no nudges, nothing that caused this kind of crap to turn up. Amazingly, this comes from someone who still refuses to use a text-mode IM client for routine IM needs and instead runs Pidgin all the time; go figure.

In closing, why can't we all just use XMPP and forget about voice and video, nudges, winks, emoticons, etc. forever?