[messaging] Summary of discussion session at USENIX HotSec

[Tom Ritter]

On 20 August 2014 12:33, Joseph Bonneau <jbonneau at gmail.com> wrote:
> *We discussed some of the challenges around group chat and why it is
> fundamentally different than 2-party chat. Most of the room yawned at this
> discussion. The feeling was that 2-party chat still is predominant (and
> probably will continue to be). We may need stronger evidence that users
> really care about multi-party chat to justify the high complexity this adds
> to messaging protocols (which raises the possibility of bugs and has a real
> security cost). We could also use stronger evidence of what UX users
> actually want out of a multi-party chat client.

I'm surprised by this, it isn't actually my experience.  But perhaps
the issue isn't that a majority of people use group chat, but that a
majority of people expect group chat to be available if they want to
use it. GChat, Facebook Chat and iMessage all have group chat
functionality and if one were to remove it, I'm not sure people would
be happy.

-tom