Ideas to extend this little project? - A pidgin web ui

Question

I have built a little Web UI for Pidgin(respectively all libpurple based messengers) together with DBus and Sinatra.

It was for fun and learning purposes and now I'm looking for ideas to extend it.

Can you think of any useful applications or extensions for it?

Since I work on this project to learn something new, ideas for other technologies to be used/combined are welcome.

Finally here is the link: pidgin-web-ui

Answer 1

I few things that that might use to many many people would be:

1. good and simple to configure https support, so that users in "monitored" countries to be able to still chat freely (if the server is somewhere else).
2. Unified Message Archive . Many IM clients have various archive functions, but are different, limited, hard to search, and many are "client only", so not accessible when one needs them the most. Since Pidgin can connect to so many IM networks, it would be cool to have such a "global message hub archive". This would ensure that everything the user is talking is archived (very useful for businesses too), easy to search, available on a server (so always at hand).
3. File Archive on the server. The same as the Unified Message Archive, but for the files/images users exchange. Having them on the server (with a hash for easy sync) as a backup and archive would greatly reduce the traffic if they need to be shared more than once.

The would be many more nice features, that would help many users, but the above 3 seem to miss from usual IM software.

Answer 2

My idea after a brainstorming minute:

Dropbot

• Create a messaging account anywhere and add this account as a contact to your messenger. This contact is your Dropbot.
• Change your interpreter UI so it does not display a conversation but a log. In this way you can just drop things to the contact like interesting links. There could be a Dropbot for a read later queue, your favorite citations or for a list of funny findings.
• You could then extend your UI to a little mashup. It could follow the links and grap the title of the page and a content preview just as Facebook does it when posting a link to your wall.
• You could further extend your app by adding post-drop behavior to the Dropbot.
  • Dropbot could post your link (probably with a message) on Twitter or Facebook.
  • Dropbot could automatically distribute the link to the other contacts of it (like your friends)

Ok, that sounds fine... but you could do that without a message bot inbetween. What's the deal?

For me the advantage would be that my IM is always open and it would be fairly easy to drop a link. You could do the link dropping with Delicious or post stuff to a Google Wave, yeah. But I don't like to go to a web page, log in and organize stuff in the UI. Actually I stumble upon those links when I should do more important stuff instead. So just dropping it to my IM Dropbot contact would be cool.

Answer 3

Why not extend it to cover all the basic features of instant messaging (sending/receiving messages, adding contacts, etc...)? Seeing how many features you can reproduce may be a fun exercise. Create your own little Meebo...

Answer 4

Want to have fun?

Make a Markov-chained-based chatbot integrated into the web app. Make it use scraped web search results for the content, after searching for terms parsed out of the human's responses. That should be fun, and will give you funny, and sometimes eerily smart-looking results. Have fun!

Answer 5

I have seen your code. Why not split dbus_thread into a event_machine daemon for further scalability?

Answer 6

Integrate it with Twitter. Trace conversations (@Replies), including multi-party involvement. Log them. And so on.

Many interesting features and a popular, original API to learn.