Hi, I'm very interested in the PEP xep, in particular in combination with the User Activity XEP. However, I have a few remarks about the specification as it is. Also, maybe it is just me, but I can't seem to find any meaningful implementation of PEP among existing clients and servers. The best I could do is with tigase and psi: I enabled the "Publish tunes" in the psi client and I could indeed see that the xml was pushed to another client in the XML console. But that's about it: an XML message in a debugging console. I think pep is pretty cool and I wonder why it's not given a bit more attention from implementors.
Now to my remarks: First off, it is my feeling that providing a fixed activity list, even if it can be supplemented by way of a catch-all <other/> category, is very arbitrary and that many people might feel very reluctant to log their activities as dictated by a such an authoritative list. Further organizing that list in a two-level hierarchy is also very constraining: why wouldn't people want to organize their activities in much deeper hierarchies? I had a look at onesocialweb's attempt to use activitystreams for that, but that format seems to be bound to the same limitations. Now to something more important: as I understand it publishing activities is an all-or-nothing option: subscribers can optionally filter out activities they are not interested in, but I cannot myself choose which activities I'd like to share with a specific friend or group of friends. That's too bad: I was thinking of activities as a way to share statistics - sports statistics for example, and I don't want to potentially bother everyone with these statistics (or force them to filter them out). Another use would be for me to share some bad habit, like alcool, smoking or drug use for example, while seeking support from a (potentially anonymous) group of people who share the habit. In that case, I obviously wouldn't even want others to know that I have that kind of behaviour. My third remark is on statistics: aside from the type of activity, there's a lot of additional info that users are likely to be wanting to track, if they bother to log their activity in the first place: let's mention: duration of an exercising session, amount spent on a meal, title of book being read, etc... It would be great to allow people to add such information. I already have some ideas on how to address some of these issues, but as suggested on j...@conference.jabber.org, I will now stick to just mentioning the "problem I'd like to solve rather than suggesting how it might be solved". best, Candide
