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Comment by dmacvicar | Hacker News Reader

I implemented a part of a similar Facebook HTTP-based chat protocol in 2009. May be the same one?

I had started in 2001 a KDE multi-protocol messenger client called Kopete. I went inactive later but in 2009 I was using Facebook a lot so I "revived" my Kopete checkout to implement this custom protocol. I got the basics working: send messages and presence.

https://github.com/dmacvicar/kopete-facebook

Ironically, I stopped because they added XMPP support and Kopete already supported XMPP.

I now realize they deprecated XMPP it in early 2014, which is probably the reason Pidgin is now implementing the HTTP protocol I was looking at in 2009.

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I used to use Kopete back in the KDE 3 days often. Thanks for your work!

Now, I don't really use IM like I used to. Back then (middle and high school), mainly with AIM and MSN, I'd spend hours on IM each day. Now it's an occasional Google Talk or Facebook message and using HipChat with my work team. A different world I guess.

I actually recently installed Trinity DE (continuation of KDE 3.5) just for fun and old times sake. One of the first things I did was install Kopete. I tried logging into AIM, but found only one person I barely ever knew online, with hundreds offline.

Thanks!. Most of the work, like in lot of opensource projects, was the product of a big team of great people, from which I learned a lot and I owe them a big part of shaping my career.

Completely different world!. Instant Messaging is now done in big part from the smartphone, or from a webpage while visiting a social network or checking email.

what made you want to write kopete when gaim was still pretty popular? i remember kde switching over to use that as the default around 3.5 not understanding why people didn't like gaim/pidgin anymore.

At that time, various things:

* At that time, most apps where available in their "desktop" versions. So if you used Gnome you tended to use Gnome versions of the app.

(it was a silly world back then)

* I was starting with development at that time, and the Gnome "SDK" was something I found not appealing at all. It could not even be called a platform, but a random collection of libraries. KDE on the other side was very consistent and appealing for developing GUI apps.

(And you may remember the KDE hate about non-standard-C++ and QObject, from the same guys that brought you Vala and GObject later)

* I had back then this opinion of not looking at my contact list by IM system, but by person with multiple transports.

That followed by KDE addressbook integration, etc. I would guess nowadays Pidgin also has this, but that was new back then. Kopete was a testbed for all this ideas.

* GAIM was not very stable back then

neat. you and the BeAim guy should have teamed up.

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