Facebook in Pidgin

[John Bailey]

Haudy Kazemi wrote:
>> Oh, so since other IM clients want to implement screen-scraping, we should do it
>> too?  I remember being taught in primary school that "other people do it" is
>> never a valid reason to do anything.  The context was, of course, different, but
>> the concept still applies.
>>   
> That primary school teaching is simplistic, intended to get people to
> think first, act second.

And that is precisely what I'm saying needs to be done here.  We have enough
dirty hacks in the Pidgin and (especially) libpurple code without adding a
plugin that is intended to be *nothing* other than a dirty hack.

> It is a competitive advantage to support additional communications
> avenues, particularly ones as popular as Facebook (now at 120 million
> (!) active users according to their own stats).  This is around the
> number of users on the Jabber and AIM networks, and an order of a
> magnitude more than ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, or Sametime.  (See the user base
> summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#User_base )

<snip rambling that has no bearing on this discussion>

As Stephen Eilert already pointed out, we are an open source software project,
not a business with revenue streams to care about.  Most of us, myself included,
couldn't care less about competitive advantages and market share.  Those same
people among us work on Pidgin for ourselves first and will implement things for
others when, and only when, it interests us to do so.  If a user doesn't like
our decisions, the user is free to find another application to meet his/her
needs.  End of discussion.

Thus far I count (among Pidgin developers) Ethan, Stu, myself, and Daniel
opposed to including a Facebook plugin, and Mark as the only supporter.  Of the
developers who have responded thus far, I'd say it's pretty clear what we as a
collective want, and it's NOT a Facebook plugin.  I would, however, like to see
our other developers give a simple yes or no on including a Facebook plugin for
the sake of driving the point home.

John

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