Choosing Favorites
Someone was asked what their favorite feature in Triton was. Is it the Buddy List®? Tabbed IM’s? SuperBuddies®? file-transfer? talk? instant-images? chatrooms? voice-chats? the vast array of expressions you can choose? Is it the fact that your friends are all there?
That was an interesting question to me. Being an architect, I’m crushed that I can’t say my favorite feature is its performance and rock-solid-implementation. I know we have a lot of work to do in these aspects. Given sufficient time, and with the right focus, I am confident we will achieve amazing results soon.
The question, though, still left me wanting my own answer. I did not think of this at the time, but, there is one feature I am most passionate about, but it’s not actually a feature of Triton, it’s of Open-AIM, and that is plugins support. This feature offers endless possibilities to anyone with the means to write one. AOL does not have to think and do everything, it can delegate some of the value added to others (Proof of point: Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin.) “How liberating?!” was what one said about this concept. So true. It’s also my favorite feature in Firefox.
In all, rather than working towards building a favorite feature, I look forward to the day when users don’t even think of the client. It does everything they need, without annoyances, elegantly, gracefully, and therefore simply fades into the background. That’s when we will know we have the perfect client–and my truly favorite feature.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Agreed.
I believe our goal should be to continue working towards a solidly performing Triton, with which we can Leverage our large and experienced user-base to help build upon it. Firefox has done it beautifully. I hope we can achieve the same success.