How would you respond if you were sued by a distraught parent of a molested child who loved hanging out in one of the elegant and enchanting worlds you've built and/or hosted? What if your Halloween (or other thematic) world were inundated with spam chat touting external products or services? How could/would Adobe gracefully pull back if it removed ATMO chat? Would it emphasize other potential uses instead? Would it even be the SAME PRODUCT anymore? Would it drop ATMO altogether?????
All products evolve over time, and Atmosphere has been around for quite a while, originally as part of a much smaller company with a different marketing philosophy. As both the technology and the market have evolved, it should have become fairly obvious that the chat capabilities of Atmosphere are not nearly as central to the mission of Atmosphere as they were years ago in a different context. Adobe has not had chat-enabled environments of it's own for quite a while now (the famous HomeWorld question). I personally view chat and community as only one of many vertical markets and opportunities that a broad platform like Atmosphere can address, certainly not the central one. The Atmosphere Collaboration Server allows the developer to enable chat or the developer can simply disable chat by not pointing to the collaboration server when publishing an environment. Furthermore, the developer can use the collaboration server for synchronization and still disable chat through JavaScript control of the Plugin user interface. Please note, as well, that one can publish an environment as part of a web site and protect the environment with exactly the same mechanism as one would protect the web site, through the use of standard web security mechanisms (a simple login will work just fine, and will restrict access to the environment in the same way it restricts access to the web page that contains it). In this way, a developer could have a chat enabled community space that required the user to have a valid login name and password, if they desired.
I think it is important that people here understand that community, while part of the story, is not really the main part of the story going forward. Atmosphere has become a very broad platform (and will become even broader as time goes on), and can be used for a wide variety of experiences on the web and in PDF documents. Please check our web site (www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere) to read the current market positioning of the platform in more detail.
I hope you will all continue to work with Atmosphere in a variety of contexts and enjoy community features to the extent that you wish to use them.
Michael
Microsoft is dropping chat for one reason and one reason only
THEY CAN'T MAKE MONEY OFF OF FREE CHAT
But of course we've been though this before, and atmo has a billion other things going for it :)
Silencing all for the few? Too right. Death to text messaging, 'chat' and the simplification of language! Revive the art of conversation and chat might be worth enabling.
Eddie
I agree with you superted.
It's not only ironic, it's non sense.