Mea Culpa - I was wrong

[Charliep]

Richard:

"customer acquisition" is a marketing term. Use "user acquisition" in its
place. The premise of improving user acquisition is is that with more users
you will get more volunteers who can help develop new features. Another
eventuality is that if Pidgin goes mainstream somebody (like Google) will
come forward with a way to monetize or sponsor or subsidize development
costs

Can you please tell me where I can download this patch? The present Buddies
-- Show -- Protocol Icons really does not work. It shows BOTH the green /
clock / paper icons and the IM Protocol icons. Two icons per contact defeats
the entire purpose and makes the program almost impossible to use for me. I
like to keep a very skinny window open on the right hand side of my screen,
and with two icons and the ... after the name I am left with 1 character of
the person's name.




Richard Laager wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 02:40 -0700, Charliep wrote:
>> I believe that the utility of these icons is from a customer acquisition
>> /
>> customer migration point of view.
> 
> This assumes that gaining users is somehow our goal. You refer to them
> as "customers" but that's not really relevant--nobody is paying us.
> 
> For me personally, I'm just trying to make the IM client I use the best
> one for my needs (and my co-workers, etc.). If other people like that,
> that's excellent. I love to include ideas and features from other
> people, as that provides basically free benefits to me. I don't mind
> helping users with bugs, as fixing bugs before I hit them is useful and
> helping others is important for the community. After all, I like it when
> developers of other projects that I use help me with bugs. Now, I also
> enjoy writing things that are useful to large numbers of people, that's
> true. But I'm not in this to gain every last user I can.
> 
> If we were a commercial project, then we'd be adding features left and
> right to attract users. Each of these would increase the size of the
> codebase, increasing maintenance costs and the bug count. Ninety percent
> of the users use ten percent of the features. If you target the
> majority, you can cut your work tenfold. The other 10% can use a client
> that caters to their needs or use/write plugins to do what they need.
> 
>> My repeated point is that the engineering cost to include this feature
>> will
>> not harm the existing userbase and the engineering requirements are
>> relatively low.
> 
> In this case, you're probably right about the engineering requirements,
> though I would caution you against making these assumptions unless
> you've actually done an analysis of the code (and maybe you have here, I
> don't know). Additionally, it is still our view (or at least mine) that
> this feature is useless, so even one line of code is too much
> maintenance for something that has no purpose.
> 
> This feature ("protocol icons") *exists now*. Someone wrote a clean
> patch and we accepted it some time ago. I think that was a mistake, as
> those people who were whining about the feature probably now feel
> validated, which is a dangerous thing (i.e. they'll do that again the
> next time they want a feature). I believe the primary motivation for
> accepting it was to stop the complaining that was dragging on our time.
> That said, the feature is here, so check the box and let's all get on
> with our lives.
> 
> Richard
> 
>  
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at pidgin.im
> http://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel
> 
> 

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Change-the-Green-Online-Icon-to-an-Icon-reflecting-the-IM-Protocol--tf4604722.html#a13188778
Sent from the Pidgin - Development mailing list archive at Nabble.com.