Telepathy (software)

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Telepathy is a software framework for interpersonal communications. It aims to simplify development of communications applications and promote code reuse by defining a logical boundary between the applications and underlying network protocols. Applications use Telepathy components via the D-Bus inter-process communication mechanism.

There are free software implementations of various protocols that export Telepathy interfaces:

Gabble: for Jabber/XMPP, including support for Jingle (protocol)
Butterfly: for MSN
Idle: for IRC

Telepathy forms the basis of the instant messaging and voice/video calling software on the Nokia 770 and Nokia N800 as part of the Maemo platform.

[edit] How Telepathy works

Protocol implementations provide a D-Bus service called a "connection manager". Telepathy clients use these to create connections to services. Once a connection is established, further communication happens using objects called "channels" which are requested from the connection. A channel might be used to send and receive text messages, or represent the contact list, or to establish a VoIP call.