Casey Ho on Product Management

How to enable Facebook Chat in Pidgin using XMPP

2010-02-10T13:08:00.000-08:00

Today, Facebook announced XMPP support for Facebook Chat. This is big news, as this means that all XMPP enabled chat clients (including Pidgin) can now connect to Facebook with merely a few simple steps.

Doing so in Pidgin is quick and easy. To start, go to the add accounts menu. When adding an account, you should select the following values:

For the protocol type, select XMPP.

For the username, use your Facebook username. (see http://www.facebook.com/username/)

For the domain, use "chat.facebook.com"

For the password, use your Facebook password.

In advanced, do the following:

Uncheck Require SSL

Set connect port to 5222

Set connect server to chat.facebook.com

That's it! Hit save and you will be logged into Facebook chat.

For those of you who currently use the third party Facebook plugin, we strongly encourage you to switch to using the official Facebook XMPP protocol. The plugin is rife with minor problems and bugs due to how it attempts to use a number of undocumented protocols. Conversely, the XMPP implementation is official and fully supported, and will be far superior in the long run.

You can read the official Facebook blog post at http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=361

Enjoy!

(Post edited to include necessary advanced settings)

Current Projects: New ways to search within a book

2009-07-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Originally posted at http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-ways-to-search-within-book.html

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!

Habits, routines, and posting

2009-07-02T00:22:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read my blog will notice I promised all sorts of content a while back, but never delivered anything asides from some Pidgin announcements.

I have no shortage of things to write about, but just never found the time to write them. I could never make time for a post out of my busy schedule.

Starting today, that changes. I've realized that it's near impossible to make time for things that are mundane and low priority. Instead, you need to make habits out of them.

Take going to the gym for example. Ever have trouble motivating yourself to make time for a workout? I sure did. That changed the moment made it a routine. Every other day, I commit myself to exercising no matter what. If I'm busy, I cut my workout short, sometimes to a mere 20 minutes.

The important part is that it is now 100% normal for me to show up at the gym on a regular basis. Instead of planning other activities first and then wondering how I'll get to the gym, I expect to be at the gym a given time. All my other plans have to defer to the gym to some degree.

I've been successful with my gym habit, so let's see if I can apply the same lesson to blogging. Don't touch that dial!

Pidgin 2.5.8 released

2009-07-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

As many of you may have noticed, Yahoo stopped working for all users not long ago. We quickly pushed out 2.5.7 but several issues remained (such as crashes, phantom buddies, and being unable to compile).

2.5.8 is now released, which should resolve (we hope!) the remaining problems.

You can download 2.5.8 at www.pidgin.im

Voice! Video!

2009-04-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen.

PIDGIN NOW HAS VOICE AND VIDEO CHAT SUPPORT!

I doubt much explanation is needed here. Video and voice chat has probably been the most requested Pidgin feature over the past five years.

Many thanks to Maiku, our Summer of Code student from 2008 who tirelessly spent many hours implementing this. This was a huge undertaking. Maiku has told me he will accept compensation in the form of pizzas.

We expect this functionality will be released sometime this month. Stay tuned.

Watch a demo of video chat

Pidgin 2.5.5 released, fixes minor headaches

2009-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

A number of minor problems have been fixed in this new release. If you've been having problems, upgrade and hopefully they will be gone.

The download and list of changes can be found at www.pidgin.im

Encryption and OTR in Pidgin

2009-01-17T01:59:00.000-08:00

According to last month's user survey, "encrypted messages" was one of the most popular feature requests- 55% of users say it's important to them. That's huge.

To put this in perspective, only video chat is more popular at 57%.

Pidgin already has plugin support for encrypted messages. However, it helps if all your buddies have it installed too.

Thus, I asked the developers what they thought of installing encryption by default. Here's what we agreed on:

OTR (Off The Record): OTR is the most secure encryption protocol available for Pidgin, and is already a default for Adium users. While promising, it has some usability bugs that need work. Ian Goldberg, the professor who created OTR, told me he would love to have people contribute patches.
Pidgin Encryption: Pidgin Encryption has no private method of key exchange and verification, which can create a false sense of security.
Pidgin Paranoia: Pidgin Paranoia uses a form of encryption that is strong on paper, but in practice is vulnerable to attacks.
XMPP/PGP: XMPP/PGP isn't as secure as OTR, but is a published protocol standard. The developers will welcome a well written patch for this.

Long story short, we won't be including encryption in Pidgin despite how popular it is. Sorry. This may be reconsidered when improvements have been to the plugins.

I hope this gives some good insight into decisions that are being made. Feel free to ask if you want more clarification on what I wrote here.

Pidgin 2.5.4 (No more freezing on exit)

2009-01-12T18:25:00.000-08:00

Pidgin 2.5.4 has been released, which contains a number of fixes.

If Pidgin froze or hung when you tried to close it, this release will take care of that.

Also, the MSN connection problems have been resolved by Microsoft.

No more brainstorming

2009-01-03T17:24:00.000-08:00

As some of you have already noticed, the Brainstorm site was taken down not long after the launch (for those of you subscribed to the Pidgin feed, apologies for the redundancy).

This is not a post for debating why this happened. If you want to learn more, read the development mailing list and maybe even send an email.

In lieu of Brainstorm, you can now vote on individual issues on the development site.

I'm interested in knowing what you think you think of the alternative (since comments are disabled in the other posts). If it's better, great! If not, why?

If you did not see Brainstorm, here's an identical example.

Brainstorm and vote on ideas for Pidgin!

2009-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

Today Pidgin is launching a new community for users. Brainstorm, the centerpiece of this site, features a voting system for discovering the most popular Pidgin-related ideas.

With this, the developers will hopefully get a good sense of what is important. Brainstorm will also track when submitted ideas are finally implemented.

The benefits aren't limited only to the developers. Plugin developers and patch writers will be able to get some inspiration too.

Many thanks to the guys who made Ubuntu Brainstorm, which forms the backbone of Pidgin Brainstorm. Also needing recognition: Vadim Peretokin and maxious, who suggested an ideas board on my blog post about building a better community. This was all put together in less than 72 hours (notwithstanding some New Year's celebrations).

Please comment on what you think about the new site, and how it compares to the old system.

So get on out there and start submitting ideas for your favorite chat client!

Help build a better Pidgin user community

2008-12-29T00:11:00.000-08:00

2008 has been a slightly unusual year for the Pidgin chat client. Improvements were made, but the biggest news was caused by unhappy users. That's one of the reasons why I created a user survey to figure out what the big issues are.

If you're a Pidgin user, please fill the survey out! It should only take a couple of minutes and will be invaluable in figuring out how to improve Pidgin.

For some background, a change to the size of the chat input box led to the largest dispute. Time will tell whether the right decision was made; for now a bigger question looms- was there anything we could have done to handle this better?

Most of the discussion occured in a back and forth email flamewar. Frankly it's hard to gauge how big a problem is from a venue like this. To put it into perspective, Pidgin has so many users that an issue affecting 0.1% of the userbase means thousands of people are unhappy.

This post has comments enabled- do you have any suggestions for things we can do to improve the way users interact with one another and with developers? Surveying users is just one step along this path. I'm sure we can do more though, and we need things that can support the huge size of the Pidgin community.

If you're a Pidgin user or someone who has experience managing user requests, write down your ideas!

An introduction

2008-12-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

I'm a product management junkie. I've launched several startups of my own and consulted with many times more. Making a real impact on users motivates me first and foremost. One of the first pitches I ever made (when I was still a teenager, no less) was to Bill Gates.

I have the pleasure of working on two products with staggeringly large userbases right now- Google Book Search and Pidgin. I am attempting to improve the relationship of Pidgin with its users, and will often blog about this.

My roots also start in engineering. I both design and build many of the things I work on.

The question I want to answer: What does it take to an idea from nothing to success, and to get others to buy in along the way?

I want this blog to reflect that. It will have a heavy dosage of musing about product issues, with a sprinkling of entrepeneurship and engineering.

I don't intend on maintaining any sort of regular posting schedule, but I will certainly write whenever I have some stroke of inspiration.

This is a personal blog, and my writings do not reflect the opinions of my employers.