I have been thinking about need for modification of various streams as they pass the IM servers. I will like to see what others think of such a service. Also, are there other services which offer this type of facility.
Background
IRC was the first wldely used interactive conversation tool on the web. Since then several interactive conversation tools have been designed. These include Yahoo IM, AIM, MSN IM, Skype, several SIP based IM tools, ICQ, several Jabber based tools to name a few. These tools have provided transparent communication between users of the IM service. They have stayed away from modification of the stream. The believe has been that the dynamic nature of this conversation comes from the user’s behavior rather then modification of their input. However, there are several applications where modification of the user’s stream can be very useful and can result in interesting applications.
Potential Applications of Stream Modification
The applications of stream modification are dependent on the type of stream:
Text based IM Stream Modification
Text based IM is widely used on the Internet today. There are several ways in which stream modification can enhance experience offered by current IM services.
- If two users one English speaking and another German speaking want to communicate over text based IM the stream modification can provide the stream translation.
- Emoticons are widely used on the IM today. The stream modification can take it several level higher where symbols as entered by users can be translated in various forms.
- The stream modification engine can search for certain keywords and filter them.
Video Stream Modification
WebCams are widely used today for interactive communication. As more people start using Mobile phone’s camera, the video conversation is likely to become even more popular. The video conversation can be enhanced using the stream processing engine by offering various facilities:
- Adding custom music clips to the video stream.
- Adding various text or watermarks to the video stream.
- Adding various forms of video effects to the stream.
Picture Stream Modification
Picture exchange remains very popular over IM services. The stream processing engine can add various effects, and water marks to the stream processing engine.
Mixed Mode Stream Processing
The ofcourse a person sitting in front of a PC can type words which automatically get converted to speech it passes the stream processing engine going towards a mobile phone. The mobile phone user can use speech to communicate which gets translated to text before it reaches the PC user.
I am sure there are several other applications which can use such a feature.
Stream Processing Engine Requirement
Engine should be Programmable
To fulfill requirements of various applications, it should be possible to program the engine to do different things. The programming language used to program should cater to fast scripting. Can we use something like python for the purpose?
Engine should be Personal
Different users using the stream processing engine on the same servers will want to do different types of modifications. The users should be able to program the SPE based on what they want to do with streams they are generating or receiving.
Engine should Extendable
It should be possible to extend the SPE with new sets of processing libraries.