On the one hand, we aren’t restricting ourselves to supporting a common denominator of protocols; we aim to support as much of each protocol as we can.

On the other hand, all protocol extensions I can think of have been to XMPP, and in each case we’ve discussed our efforts with the XMPP community and worked to standardize it.

On the one side you are just implementing the common denominator of most chat protocols, and on the other hand you are advancing the protocols in a way that only telepathy-enabled apps can use them.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to extend _one_ messaging protocol for a start, so that every app/plattform may support it?

Still, why can’t you use JFT instead of extended SI for your tubes? Seems like really small step for FT support then. And later you could add other transports (ICE) to JFT (alongside existing SOCKS5 and IBB).

There aren’t many applications implementing tubes with which you have to be backwards compatible, are there.

Never mind, it was just suggestion.

1. We still don’t have file transfer, just tubes.
2. Jingle is our long term plan but we needed something now.
3. I talked about this on jdev.

It’s good to hear you can finally do SOCKS5 filetransfers!

Regarding your ‘simple extension’ – Jingle File Transfer XEP uses also SOCKS5 and IBB and can fall back to IBB, so it seems you are reinventing a wheel here. Jabbim client implements this. Maybe you should have asked other developers on jdev and/or standards mailing lists – they would have pointed you to this XEP.

http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0234.html