Hi,
The website seems to suggest that Contacts uses the standard Jabber/XMPP protocol, which is great. However, you seem to only be able to use it with a Nokia-provided (Ovi branded) XMPP account - is this correct? I'd really like to be able to use an existing XMPP account (eg Google Talk), as then moving between the desktop and phone would be a more seamless experience, and I can bring my existing contacts with me.
Frankie
Hey,
Currently yes, we support only the Nokia Account as an XMPP account.
At the moment we don't have plans to enable other Jabber Accounts to be used in authentication directly, but that may evolve from there. Your request is something we've got before as well, and we're weighing the options to help you out.
The good thing (at the moment) though is that you can chat on the go with the Google Talk friends, provided that you just add the friends to the Contacts on Ovi account too.
-Kristian
Hi, thanks. I can understand your reasons - you presumably want to tie people into using Ovi, and perhaps don't want the hassle of supporting third-party accounts - but I think it'd be a real advantage to enable people to authenticate with their existing Jabber account. Having to manage two sets of contact lists is a real pain. Plus it's confusing for my contacts to have two 'Frankie Roberto's listed in their contacts list - how are they meant to know which one to use?
So for me, this feature is a show-stopper. I think you'll get a lot more credibility once this is enabled (plus, the user experience will be so much better - no need to have to add contacts on the phone).
I agree with the original poster; the strength of Ovi Chat will be its ability to simply work easily across other IM services easily.
Personally, I've already started moving friends and family to using my Ovi name for IM instead of other services because I am so often mobile; but the ability to associate other IM accounts (GTalk, AIM, etc) with this Ovi Chat account would help things there easily.
In terms of function, it would be great if there wasn't a separate tab needed for those who are online (Ovi or otherwise) but that it simply appeared in the normal contact list with a menu option to "filter by online presence" and then one could merge those chat contacts with those already in the addy book (speaking from the N95 NAM, FP2/5th Edition might offer this functionality easier).
I tried adding jaiku bot and pingdotfm to my friends list , they don't work , is there a way to make them work ?Although they work very well with google talk .
If this thing works then I don't have to long into Fring to update my status.
another vote for googletalk ID in chat :D
I absolutely agree with ARJWright. I've said this before, and will say it again. I am waiting for Nokia to really make these applications all work together in a seamless manner. That starts will working to one contact list, that I can then sort by who is online via msn, gtalk, etc. It is very important Nokia for you get that part right! There are too many other programs that offer that functionality to not incorporate it here. I also feel that the contacts list should be directly connected to Nokia maps for all of the location based services.
I really liked the direction I was seeing with the Gizmo for Nokia product, but nothing more has happened in that direction. Gizmo already allows me to access all of my messenger profiles on the phone, make VOIP calls, transfer files etc., I expect the final Nokia package to do all that Gizmo does, but package that with the location based services.
I am longing for the day when I am pull up a contact from my address book, and access any manner of communication and location service to interact with that contact that I could want without having to open several different programs. It should then be seamless to move between desktop to phone using these services.
This is what I want from Nokia, and I am hoping that you guys get it all together by the time the N97 gets to the US, so that I can then have my perfect phone!
it seems unanimous that everyone wants to be able to log in using existing xmpp accounts rather than creating a new ovi one. for me, i cannot be bothered to tell all my friends i have a new ID, i already have an msn, yahoo and gtalk, so to start using another one is pointless as there is already a big choice of IM clients that support all the protocols. offering location data and whats playing in the users status message is a very cool touch but not enough to make me bother changing from Slick.
i'm looking forward to the updates though
Adding 100+ people to my contact list again is an impossible task. Plus the confusion of having two of me in the contact list will throw off a lot of people on my list.
I really like the UI and features of this app, but until I can use my gtalk id, Slick is the clear winner.
Whats the point of using an open protocol if you're going to lock down the client. The old Nokia wouldn't have done this! (You know, back when they put their user first.)
Ok,
Trust me, I'm collecting your votes and keeping track of them. Would you be satisfied if we were to be able to add other service credentials so that you could access the friendslist easierly that way? Would that fullfill the need?
This isn't in our roadmaps yet, but we could spend some more time investigating it if you see that needed. (Like I think you do)
@mdanuz: They do work for me. And friend feed IM also. Interesting. Can you give another go?
-kristian
i think the decision will be unanimous amongst users for full XMPP support rather than this locked into Ovi approach?
can a poll be set up on these boards? that way you can get an idea of just how many people are bothered about having the option?
The possibility of adding several accounts would work for me. I don't mind having the ovi chat account online if I can also be online on the other services with the same application. However even with the xmpp accounts I would still be missing icq/aim, msn, yahoo and skype. I currently use e-buddy, which has most of the stuff I need, but it would be nice to have a service that integrates more phone features.
@kristian I tried it again , jaiku and ping.fm are working fine.
How did you activatre your IM on frinedfeed , I am in able to select the full link (verification link) which FF sends when I activate ovi account.
I can only select partial link , am I missing something ?
Ya it will be good to add other credentials to contacts on ovi .
@mdanuz: yes, I activated it with the chat client. I've noticed that the component we use sometimes misses a link, try navigating to the link from "top to down", instead of "bottom up". Let me know if it helped. Other option is to click the link with the PC client, before we get it working. Sorry.
Being able to use Nokia Contacts with your existing XMPP credentials is *essential*. The thing that bugs me is that Nokia obviously sees the benefits in the way that XMPP works, and advertises the ability to chat to people on other networks, and yet doesn't let you take full advantage of the federated nature of XMPP. You should be being totally agnostic about which service/server supplies the IM credentials - be it Google, Nokia (through Ovi), or indeed your own personal Jabber/XMPP server.
It's a bit like the OpenID situation, where there are plenty of 'providers' of OpenID, and yet few sites that accept OpenID credentials as a consumer... Data portability works both ways!
So please, get Contacts working with *any* supplied XMPP credentials asap, and you'll be rewarded by tons of good publicity and buzz in the blogosphere / technical early adopter crowd. There are a LOT of Google Talk users out there who'd love to be able to take their IM activity to the phone...
i can see why nokia want there users to sign up to Ovi and use this exclusively, but in the real world this just isn't going to happen. what the app needs is an advanced users setting, so, beginners get to create an Ovi account to get started but those of us in the know can click on advanced, and enter all our XMPP log in details and use those without the need to use Ovi for chat at all??
Just giving an access to Google Talk and Live Messenger addressbooks in Ovi does not really work for me. The invitation and configuration / identity selection problem for all my friends still remains. Earlier someone already commented that they would not mind if the Ovi account were active at the same time than the other accounts, but even in that case those other accounts should be accessible with direct connections to those service providers, not through proxying via Ovi servers.
I don't know, why Kristian doesn't say it out loud, but "Contacts on OVI" is not plain XMPP (at least I think it isn't).
The reason for this is, that with XMPP, one cannot chat energy-efficiently. There is no such thing as a performant 'idle' method, so Nokia has to work arrount this by binding the application to one domain.
Here is the assumed structure:
Mobile phone <-> Ovi-Proxy <-> Ovi XMPP Server
The big advantage of this is, that there is no third party server involved (like it is in any other IM for mobile phones that I know).
(note: these are only my personal assumptions based on decent IM development on mobile phones)
one cannot chat energy-efficiently?
does this mean that the battery performance of the mobile is better than any other IM application when using Ovi ?
Hey Nokia, Beware of mad it crowd.
When the mad IT crowd went against what was wrong about XP they collected tons of features that we, the IT crowd, believed was ABSOLUTELY needed for their operating system. And then came Vista. Guess who were the people throwing stones against it????. Yes, we were, the mad IT crowd.
We wanted a chat solution coming out of the box for so long, that at this point we want everithing on it..., well, i know i want a bunch of new features...
It would be nice if you make it possible to log into other networks, as well as OVI, of course an All In One Messenger... Excellent Idea!!!
BUT if you are going after that, PLEASE, don't make it useless as it happened with Gizmo. You can log into the Gizmo network (instead of OVI), and also in MSN, Yahoo!, etc..., but the performance is so awfull that I tried the application for 2 days and erased it.
So, please, beware, don't loose simplicity and performance of your sight.
Vitaliano G.
@handschuh: I promise, we're plain XMPP. From the mobile, directly to the XMPP server. We've made every effort to optimize the way we use the connectivity to enjoy idle periods to the extreme. This is what we think we do well. At least that's how it looks to me comparing some other Mobile IM services.
-Kristian
I hadn't used Nokia Chat before and Contact on Ovi - chat is new to me. Some questions i wanted to get clarifications from this forum:
1. Do i need to install Psi, Adium or Pidgin program before using chatting function on mobile? if so, it will increase a lot of resistance on service take up
2. I've intsalled the Pidgin on desktop, but i repeatedly encountered error when i searched Ovi fiends.
3. Any user manual (better with screenshots)of Contact on Ovi - Chat so far?
4. For the music playing sharing function, i couldn't find this feature under My Profile. What would be the cause? Shall one needs to download another mobile software?
5. If i change my phone, do i need to add all these contacts again to this client by myself?
Some initial comments:
1. Why couldn't i add the contacts sync from Ovi.com automatically? Is it because they may not own Nokia account?
2. If not, i think at least one should be able to call the contact from the native address book during friend search?
3. in HK market, all the 5 operators had launched mobile MSN services which is so far the largest IM community here. I'm also one of the users, though not frequent. I don't need to add again all the contacts to the mobile client as they are already there in the desktop version. The new mobile client has the basic txt + emoticon chatting, together with voice and audio file sending, but without other file transfer and location info. We need to identify the competitive advantages of Contact on Ovi for preparing an impactful launch in devices bundled with it.
Serina
1. No. Like the softwares you mentioned, this is Chat on Ovi is also a instant messaging software. All you need is a Nokia Account to use Chat on Ovi.
4. What phone are you using?
5. No. Once you have added your friends, whenever you will login to CoO, your friends will show up in your list automatically.
@kristian
that is very interesting! Did you extend xmpp (both server and client [which would leave the server standard xmpp-compliant])?
Another vote for being able to use a Google XMPP account.
"Would you be satisfied if we were to be able to add other service credentials so that you could access the friendslist easierly that way? Would that fullfill the need?"
In a word, YES!
Basically, the ability to add other IM "identities" to one's Ovi profile so that no matter the IM service, Ovi would be the singular login point, but the person would show up on all of those services with the same status message.
The logistical hurdle here of course is getting a message to more than one service and sending it back. I would assume that the messaging server that Ovi is using would be able to channel the IMs by Ovi user > IM service > IM service user so that there would be less possible confusion.
The other part of that is of course being able to take a contact, and then add all of their IM identities to that particular client. For Ovi users, this would be no issue, but for those not on Ovi, there would need to be some means of reconciling those members. Possibly something similar to the way that services like LinkedIn handle contacts from various services where you can import contacts from a service, and then on the Ovi Messaging server side, there would be an attempt to reconcile IM names/email address with the already existing contacts.
Something like this is a bit of a lunge - though would essentially grab all of one's contacts, make Ovi Contacts the overall "messaging" area, and then make way for an eventual service where people just message one another, without thinking whether they are doing email, SMS, or IM.
AntoineRJWright.com | MobileMinistryMagazine.com
Yet another vote for either transports, or bulk contacts import, or both. I'll use this, if I can get all my existing contacts into it, without bothering them with "invitations". It's pretty critical for any social application that it needs to have people in it, and until there are people in it, there's no point joining. So unless you can rapidly populate it, it will never happen.
The logistical hurdle here of course is getting a message to more than one service and sending it back. I would assume that the messaging server that Ovi is using would be able to channel the IMs by Ovi user > IM service > IM service user so that there would be less possible confusion.
XMPP does this by nature; it's a federated system with a DNS-like structure, so each XMPP server has its own namespace, and any client connected to a server can reach any other client (look up xmppserver.example.com on the DNS, then ask xmppserver.example.com at 1.2.3.4:whatever for user@example.com).
I think being able to use more than 1 set of credentials would be fine for most people, but if you have people repeated in 2 jabber accounts that'd be confusing. Maybe being able to see the contacts list by user (service, credentials) would be best - I mean, separate (visually?) list for an ovi and a google account would be great. I think different tabs would be best but expandable lists may suffice, for instance
==ovi account
contact
contact
contact
...
==google account
contact
contact
...
==another google?
contact
contact
...
or maybe adding a tab for each account is easier?
Please count my vote for being able to connect to arbitrary XMPP servers. Directly from the mobile is best: I am not willing to show my password for my jabber server to any proxy. There would be technical troubles with proxy approach, too: for example, if the jabber server uses SSL certificate signed by a private CA.
Eugene
BTW, signing into Ovi from another client always triggers an SSL cert warning.
I've gone to the trouble of setting up my own jabber/xmpp server for my family, and it's not really practical to use anything other than that for chatting with my family... And I have no wish to tell my other contacts of *another* identity change.
Therefore I also would like to be able to connect to arbitrary jabber/xmpp servers from Contacts on OVI
@Alex.Harrowell: Do you have time/date setting set right?
-Kristian
To the best of my knowledge.
If by that you mean the installation of an inter-XMPP transport, that would greatly enhance the utility of the service. It wouldn't even require a user interface on the phone itself - given that this capability is mainly needed by advanced users, I don't think it would be a problem to simply have users activate the transport through the Psi pubsub browser.
The main issue would be scalability, but that would be partially mitigated by making the feature non-obvious such as described above.
Here is another vote for Google talk. I would really like to be able to log in with my existing account than creating new one.
Thanks.
The app looks good but useless to me unless I can log in with my existing Google Talk account.
The GoogleTalk client doesn't let you connect to any other xmpp network either, does it? Also if I remember correctly, it initially didn't do s2s very well, so you couldn't talk to people on other networks, and it required special configuration to connect with other clients because they hadn't set their DNS SRV records and their server was set up in an odd way. Ovi does all this properly already, and everything else they've done has stuck very close to XMPP standards.
So don't be too tough on the Ovi guys, eh? :)
I agree, but that is not the point. This service will just die if the Nokia's policy doesn't change. It has no perspective, and still........ time will tell.
Another vote for all/any jabber servers. Not just google talk - just jabber would be great (PLEASE don't limit us to google). Keep up the good work!
I just got my e63 the other day and downloaded ovi contacts. It looks great and has some nice potential, but as the previous posters have mentioned the openness of using other jabber accounts without duplicating contacts would be great. So is there a status update on this?
Nope, what I can only promise is that these sorts of things progress slowly, as it is not entirely dependant on us.
It takes two to tango ;-)
-Kristian
The Google Talk Client (the executable program you run on your pc) which has been updated in ages will only let you log in with your google account, but just as nokia's ovi contacts client it will let you add other jabber users as friends.
I imagine the nokia client is optimized to run without all the overhead bandwidth sometimes occurring on xmpp (jabber) IM, and maybe therefore has to only hook up to the ovi server... that's just a guess though....
---
N95 31.0.0.17
Some guess-working related to the posts here... Nokia accuried OZ Communication some time ago which has some excellent mobile apps in the multi IM and social networking sector... :) It will be inters ting to see what they decide to do with them...
Personally I like my ovi contacts id just fine and are nagging friends to adopt it whether or not they have a nokia phone...
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N95 31.0.0.17
Very nice project, but without openess to Gtalk it doesn't make much sense.
It seems it is will be another Nokia nonsense projects just like the old buit-in IM client.
Too bad.
don't give up on OC just yet, Kristian has hinted that supporting other protocols could be on the way. see the link below.
i thought i read somewhere that OC would be part of the N97's firmware, so if thats true, it would make sense to have this implemented ready for the N97's launch?
http://betalabs.nokia.com/forum/topic/2205
N95-1 V31.0.017
UK O2
Is it true that OVi supports Gtalk and other IM protocols in new E72 phone?
I did hope Nokia had learned their lesson from the flop that is IMPS (Wireless Village) and the seemingly widespread apathy towards Push-To-Talk: not a single operator in the UK supports either, meaning several options in my last 5 or 6 Nokia handsets have been of no use to me.
I'm currently evaluating about 32 different IM programs on an E71, Ovi Contacts does appear to have many really nice features that others are lacking, namely, decent Wifi-to-3G hand-off (failover), and of course, superb integration with the handset's OS. The major stumbling block has been pointed out countless times above... the ability to use alternative XMPP services.
I personally need transports to other IM services (ICQ, MSN etc), which I provide myself using my own server (Openfire). At the very least, using GoogleTalk would allow me to use something others have heard of, rather than having yet another IM address.
Pidgin can connect to Ovi, so as Kristian has stated, it's all pure XMPP, so why would any "testing" be required to allow Ovi Contacts to utilise another XMPP server, it's on "betalabs", I thought we ARE the testing team here? ;-)
Looking forward to the next release with improved account support...
+1 for non-ovi xmpp. I've been trying lots of messenger client. I'd love to use the integrated one.
Remember Guys that in the meantime it is possible
See:
http://betalabs.nokia.com/forum/topic/3778
mbrett
N97 RM-505 (Product Code: 0585262 (Vodafone UK)) FW 11.0.021
N95 8Gb (Product Code: 0558787 (UK)) FW 31.0.015
I actually audibly laughed when I realized it's not possible to use an existing xmpp account.
I can only assume to idea was to tie users closer to the ovi service selection... However, the current strategy will only keep early adopters and IM heavy users out...
That's how it'll be for me at least: I've already chosen a service provider (Google), I've already collected a large amount of contacts, I use my own domain name in my XMPP id: I'm definitely not going to give these things up just to be able to use Contacts.
I have use psi "http://psi-im.org/" to add transports on a previous version of OVI Contacts and been able to see Google, MSN, icq, etc. contacts in OVI Contacts. It worked then, but I haven't tested this out in the latest version of OVI Contacts.
mbrett
N97 RM-505 (Product Code: 0585262 (Vodafone UK)) FW 20.0.019
N95 8Gb (Product Code: 0558787 (UK)) FW 31.0.015
http:///www.twitter.com/MartynBrett
http://www.n97geeks.com
Hey Kristlan,
One good thing about allowing Google Talk account to be used in Ovi Contact
is that we can have chat log on GMail : )
Right now, I am experiencing unreliable issue with Ovi Contact. I am using
EDGE and once in a while connection drops and gets reconnected. Many chat
messages got lost. There are no notification to both my friends and myself
that our chat message were lost on the way. This is something I would like
to get addressed : ) I know MSN/Google talk will tell me when my chat message
does not reach its destination.
What's your idea about this?
I'm with others like jku...
Nokia's in the classic meltdown: user-base falling, so piss off the remaining loyal customers until there's nothing left.
It seems that my E71 will be the last in 10years+ of Nokia usage.
My 2 cents - it may be help Nokia to better compete with Android. One of the nice things about Android phones is that once you provide your gmail credentials you have your gmail contacts on your phone. If Ovi Contacts will allow me to login to google talk, the effect will be the same.
Connecting these contacts to the phone's email application (with Gmail configured) should be easy, which will allow me to easily mail my gmail contacts from within Ovi Contacts through my gmail username.
Im so sorry to watch how nokia force us to use an ovi xmpp account instead of FREE CLIENT to CHOOSE whatever account have.
Its like the S60 email app only work with nokia email accounts, this will be really embarrasment.
Please, open source this nokia client or at least add voice support before everyone choose Android.
Best wishes.
Ps: Its really shameful to had graduated this app, How Nokia could do that ?
Had nokia try Fring or Nimbuzz or OctroTalk before ?