Idea for GSoc 2010

[Mark Doliner]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 3:26 AM, Ameya Karve <ameya.karve at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am an undergraduate student and this is my first attempt at the GSoc.
> The reason I had started using Pidgin was because of its facebook plugin. It
> gave me an All in One Place Chat Client, and I didn't have to switch between
> different tabs on my firefox to chat with various people on various
> networks. I would like to extend Pidgin, using RSS, to add functionalities
> such as GMail checking, Twitter alerts, RSS notifications, etc. Also, the
> SMS capabilities of Google Calendar could be harnessed to actually notify
> users of offliner chats without the need for a seperate protocol.
> Also, an XMPP-Twitter interface could be written, using which one would be
> able to post to Twitter directly through Pidgin.

Hi Ameya.  We tend to feel that Pidgin is more useful as a simple IM
client, and that features that aren't directly related to IM could
clutter the user interface and make the program unwieldy.  One
question you can ask yourself when trying to decide if something makes
sense to integrate into Pidgin is, "does this have the concept of a
friend list and the ability to send instant messages?"

>From the things you listed, Twitter ALMOST matches those requirements.
 But there is already a project for that, and I suspect none of us
Pidgin developers is familiar enough with it to mentor a project for
it: http://code.google.com/p/microblog-purple/

--Mark