Feeling a desperate need for a break from work on my PhD for a few days, together with a vague desire to see the parental units, I headed to South Wales for Easter weekend. While staying with my parents, my brother showed me a ‘cool’ feature of the new msn beta; Winks. For anyone as in the dark about this as me, they’re small flash animations, together with sound. They’re a bit emoticon-y, but appear over the entire chat window, completely interfering with what you’re doing. They’re a horrible feature.
Ghastly.
Awful.
Yet, my brother (about to graduate in Computer Science) likes them. Why?
The answer seems to be that they’re silly. This makes some sense, it’s a joke between friends about silly technology, rather than a useful feature. So this has me thinking; maybe we really do need more silliness in jabber. It’s a little like cartoons, you don’t watch them because they’re enlightening, it’s just a bit of mindless fun.

It’s also, of course, something of a security hole, which is why MS pulled the feature a while back, but it seems it’s back now.

All this, and, as Justin pointed out to me the other day, Psi’s about the only Jabber client now that doesn’t support xhtml-im. Am I the only person who finds their motivation to code comes in waves? I need to find some motivation to just sit down and code for a few days at a time, so we can catch up with the rest of the known world

Categories: Jabber, Psi