Idea: IM Link History
I regularly receive quite a few links via instant message in any given day. I like this, as it’s a part of the social and connectionist processes which make the Internet function, and it’s part of how things can progress in “Internet time”.
Unfortunately sometimes I’m in a state of busyness in which I’m free to chat with people off and on (since it only requires a limited amount of attention), but I just don’t have the time or attention to pull up a link and check it out. This is where my idea for the Link History window comes in.
Very similar to Safari’s Downloads window, this window contains all of the links I’ve recently received. I can just pull this window up and click on a link. It makes it much easier for me to go back and find links that people sent me which I have yet to visit.
Once a link is visited—either in the Link History window or in the original chat window—the entry for that link fades out (as in the first entry from temas). It could be automatically removed every day, or on quit, or whatever.
Next to each link is a little arrow—similar to the arrow in the display of iChat or the magnifying lens in the Downloads window—which when clicked pulls up the chat in which the link was mentioned, with the specific message highlighted. This allows me to see the context in which the link was sent.
Obviously this is not something I expect users new to chat to make much use of—but like the Downloads window in Safari, it’s something the expert users might enjoy. If I were still working on Gabber I’d certainly try to throw together something like this quickly to see how well it works in practice.
I’ve implemented this as a plugin for chatbot. As such it only works for groupchats of course. Quite comfortable nevertheless. :)
Cheers, Steve
I wrote a Jabber bot that grabbed URL’s posted in conference rooms. You could query URL’s by user that posted and by date/time. It was a very useful resource for the room’s users. Something like this shouldn’t be too hard to add as a Gaim plugin or to Gajim(Gabber incarnate IMHO)
Hi Julian,
I’m participating in Google’s Summer of Code Program this year. My project might interest you. It’s called ‘Instant Syndicating’ and it aims in helping people share information of all sorts, including bookmarks. It’s a mix of blogging, tagging, syndicating and instant messaging. I would love to hear your feedback.
Thanks,
Nick Vidal
Actually, we do this in Trillian! Both in the History for a contact since 3.x, and there’s a combined ‘all links I’ve received today’ list that’s been around since about 2.x or so.
However, we’ve never considered it an important enough feature to really push to the forefront. You make a good argument for why it might be worth pushing it a little more into the obvious features. (It’s sort of difficult to find unless you know where to look for it.)
Very cool to hear others are interested in similar things. As always, UI makes a big difference.
Nice to hear it’s yet another feature Trillian already has… somewhere. ;)
I think that one of the larger issues with something like this is that it’s somewhat useless if it’s just a collection of all links you’ve received—I consider fading out (and eventually removing) visited links to be an essential feature. Too much information making the relevant information useless and all that.
mIRC has had this since the mid 90’s, I never really liked it, you never really had any context as to what a url was about. I implemented one that sniffed my IRC logs and would produce a webpage where it would fetch each new link in turn and parse the tag if any and use that instead. This helped a bit, but a lot of pages still have missing or useless tags (Untitled should not be a default title!).
Maybe something with a few lines of context per url, and fetches tags for users.
Another approach is the rdfweb’s “Chump bot” (http://usefulinc.com/chump/)
See my above comment. ;)
Also note my description of the arrow… I consider linking back to context an essential feature as well.
There’s also the fact that IRC is much less directed than IM to begin with, so most of the URLs *start out* as useless, making the list of URLs useless as well.
[…] Well, I read Julian’s blog entry about a link history for im clients, rather like those IRC users have been enjoying for years and I thought “Hey, that’d make a great Psi plugin. Now, if only Psi had plugin support.”. Of course, some moments later I remembered my Summer of Code project to write a plugin interface for Psi. I hastily implemented a few more functions, fixed those I’d recently broken and implemented my first semi-useful Psi plugin. Yes, it’s basic. No you can’t close the window, you’ll never get it back. No, the plugin doesn’t know the user’s display name and just shows the jid. On the other hand though, no, this is not a mockup, it’s working exactly as presented below. So, I give you a screenshot of an early alpha of the URL Watcher plugin for Psi. […]
If sparks had not spoken up I was going to. I was one of the apparently, few, users of that feature of Trillian back in the early days. :)
Thanks Julian for putting the bug in our ears about this one!
I’ve been thinking about implementing something like this in AdiumX. I’m not sure how difficult it’d be though because Adium does not currently have a solid plug-in API. :(
well, its in kopete for some time, all links from contacts are stored into konqueror bookmarks in order of contacts and date, the bad thing is that it is for konqueror only..
great idea
Blake, what is AdiumX?
Thanks Julian for putting the bug in our ears about this one!