Re: [Social] Private Messaging Plugin

[Brion Vibber]

On 6/24/10 11:49 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-23 at 21:06 -0400, Sean Corbett wrote:
> > Ian and I wrote a quick draft on how we plan on making the Private
> > Messaging plugin work: http://gitorious.org/social/pages/Privatemessaging
> >
> > There are some plans in motion to have Blaine Cook's Webfinger
> > authentication scheme implemented in the StatusNet core, so many of
> > our plugins (including this one) will rely on this process to
> > authenticate users to remote GNU Social instances. Once the Webfinger
> > code is implemented into StatusNet and the view code for GNU Social is
> > in place, this plugin should be relatively simple to implement.
> I think this is something that should be in core, not a plugin.

Might be quicker to prototype as a plugin, but definitely something 
we'll want to have available as widely as possible!

Sean, quick question on the message flow -- it sounds like the messages 
won't actually get sent until the receiving server requests it after 
user action. I'm still wrapping my head around the webfinger oauth ;) 
... is this all server-server communication, or does it actually require 
some active authenticated sessions?

If it is all server-server, then there doesn't seem to be a strict need 
to wait until user interaction to fetch the message source; a server 
could simply fetch it immediately and store it locally, or send it 
direct to the user by email or another local push mechanism.

Are there other reasons for the delay, such as allowing for canceling a 
message after sending it if it hasn't been read, or showing a 'has been 
read' notification to the sender?

-- brion vibber (brion @ status.net)