I spent some time last night reviewing the logs for the last weeks. I wanted to share with you some numbers about onesoup’s usage so far:

• 513 registered users
• 3,398 chat sessions
• 1,105 upstream login errors (MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, etc.)
• 401 login errors
• 59,305 messages sent and received

So, while this is good news, it’s also surprising to see so many errors. Almost half the attempts to connect to the service ended up in failure. There is a combination of factors going on here, which I ‘ll take the opportunity to explain.

I consciously decided not to require active registration, but rather to pass on credentials to 3rd party networks. This makes it simpler to use the service, and also avoids me having to store passwords for 3rd party services. I know this is a security feature important for many users.

But passing on credentials has a down-side: not all phones support PWD authentication scheme, and insist on using MD5 (or extremely rarely SHA1). Possibly up to 1/3 of all phones don’t support PWD. That’s a large proportion of users.

I have been thinking how to address this, at the same time that I consider the  move to XMPP. Here’s what I am planning:

• In order to chat through onesoup, users will have to register and pick a username and password. This will allow me to move to support all phones.
• Signing into onesoup will connect you to the onesoup mobile community, on onesoup’s XMPP server.
• As with any XMPP server, users will be able to add XMPP contacts on other servers that are supporting the server-to-server (XMPP federation). Gtalk is allowing it.

By taking these steps, users will be able to chat with other onesoup users, and with any other friends on XMPP. This includes all native XMPP servers with s-2-s enabled, as well as Gtalk and AIM/ICQ.

However, this also means that Yahoo and MSN support will disappear. Yahoo and MSN account today for 284 out of the 513 total users. Even though it’s a difficult decision to make, for me having a reliable service is more important that serving 513 users 50% of the time only. Unfortunately, that means switching off Yahoo and MSN.

Now, these changes won’t happen immediately. I am literally starting to code the new XMPP-powered onesoup IMPS CSP chat service, and it will take weeks until I release anything that works reliably.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under onesoup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.