Buddycloud

Here's how our thinking goes:

When you send an SMS, there is no obligation on the recipient to reply immediately. Perhaps their phone is elsewhere... perhaps they just don't want to be under the pressure of having to reply immediately. IM is different you see when a user is online or offline and expect a reply.

Perhaps I speak for myself here, but I don't like the pressure of the recipient expecting an immediate reply. I like to be able to reply in my own time.

So our thinking is really:

"respect the message recipient's privacy by just having them marked as always "there" with the understanding that they may log in every now and again to reply to their BC messages."

There's a caveat that confuses things even more (there always is!):

Some people use their desktop IM clients on BC (http://www.buddycloud.com/cms/node/6). Sometimes these are setup to always be online, sometimes they mark the user offline after x minutes. Sometimes people are invisible. This only confuses things even more. So we think that it's right that people are just always "there" like with SMS and can reply in their own good time.

I should also add that, until Apple gets their inbound messaging API sorted, the iPhone Buddycloud build will have most users as offline, and perhaps logging in once an hour to check and send messages. Make of this what you will.

Also, you get an idea of when users were recently on BC by where they are in your list. Activity bubbles a user to the top of a list. Less active users bubble down.

Buddycloud runs around 30KB per hour. That includes a reasonable amount of group and private chat messages.

A quick reminder about Wednesday evening's location stammtisch. It's targeted to anyone working on location based projects in Munich. We have a table reserved at Reitschule for Wednesday evening. Come along and chat about location, what you are working or what you would like to see in future location based systems.

Language: English and German.

Details:

Cafe Reitschule
Königinstr. 34
80802 München, Germany

Reservation name: Tennant

Time: We'll kick off at 18:30 and continue until someone mentions the Starbucks-location-based-coffee-voucher example.