DISQUS

Other idea:
* Multi-User Whiteboarding sessions with Coccinella (though we need some skilled drawers for that, else you may see the ugliest things ;-) )

We'll probably switch to Theora for the video tutorials at the Coccinella website (currently we use Vimeo (Flash) for them). This is no problem for us as about 65% of our visitors uses either Firefox or Opera. Also, I guess the Webkit browser family (Konqueror, Safari, Chrome) will also support this soon. If you also count these browsers, you get about 80% of our visitors; indeed Internet Explorer visitor stats is more and more often below 20% B-)

I wonder if this is really true. If Facebook was so interested in XMPP, why didn’t they start with that? Surely it’s easier to start with XMPP than to write something else and then create a gateway. Perhaps they had no intention of an open garden, but later relented after they saw the cat was out of the bag with several clients getting Facebook chat support so quickly. Maybe we have these client authors to thank for this announcement?

My point is that instead of starting to code without thinking, it would have been better for these projects to sustain user pressure on Facebook to adopt XMPP by ignoring the new walled garden, at least. If both Adium and Digsby would have ignored Facebook Chat, the pressure on Facebook from users who want to use Facebook Chat in their favorite standalone client would only have been stronger and thus it would have been even more important for Facebook to add XMPP support very fast to please their users. So, boycotting new walled garden networks is the way to go: these networks are all too small to push their own proprietary protocols and *all* popular instant messaging clients already support XMPP. If multi-protocol clients stay competing on which new walled garden networks they support, we will never get rid of them (the walled gardens, not these clients).

This is a real concern. I hope they aren’t so frustrated that they don’t bother making the new XMPP based Facebook chat nicely integrated. It would be terrible if people continued to use the proprietary protocol when an open one is available.

Well, I don't think that will happen: who wants to maintain an inferior and duplicate interface? Only fools would do that and I'm sure the Adium/Digsby devs are no fools.

I think current transports lack in a lot of areas,

I will not deny that; but things can change ;-)

I have not seen an XMPP client that has as nice an implementation of transports and transport set up as the multi protocol clients have for their proprietary networks.

We worked on improving the integration of transports in Coccinella (and have more ideas!), maybe you should try our latest release. Feedback about how we can improve Coccinella in this regard is always welcome!

"The end result of this is that with the great help of Peter Wakefield their Customer Service Manager working through a Saturday has got everything moved over to WinExtra’s new home at VistaPages with no extra gray hairs being added to my head."

Yes, moving to VistaPages is very smooth. VistaPages optimized the process to acquire new customers so extremely good. They optimized their website to persuade new customers. They are probably amongst the top hosting companies paying affiliates like you very much money for each new customer (I guess it's more than 100USD). They seem to increase bandwidth, file storage and other features each month. They seem to reduce the prices several times a year. They seem to give huge discounts when you subscribe for a longer period. But WHY?

Because they are constant need for new customers. Leaving VistaPages is hard: whereas it takes only a few hours to get a VistaPages account, it takes *months* (I'm not kidding! :-( ) to leave them. They will suspend your account without giving sufficient details and force you to upgrade to their more expensive VPS. It's really "pay the money if you want to see your data back". You will spends days to communicate with them. Your new registrar and new hosting company will have a very hard time to negotiate with VistaPages.

My advices:
* Make regular backups of your website at your home computer or at another hosting space (this can be free hosting space). If you do this, at least they can't blackmail you.
* When you switch to another registrar and registered a domain name through VistaPages, make sure your new registrar is also an Enom reseller (which VistaPages is). Emails to VistaPages to get your EPP AuthInfo code and to unlock your domain will not be answered until you you ask your new registrar to send a complaint to Enom. If you do this, Enom will send you the EPP code and VistaPages will unlock your domain name in a few days...amazingly how motivating it can be for a hosting company to lose its partnership with its upstream registrar.

Please do not hesitate to contact me in case VistaPages service shows it real face after a few months (I hope for you not): from my 4 months experience with "dealing" with VistaPages I maybe can be of help. Also note that I am willing to provide a linkback to your bad word of mouth story on this blog if you feel the need to write something like that (see victims section on my blog post).

You can read my VistaPages review at my blog and also the following thread at the Drupal forums is very interesting:
http://drupal.org/node/135080