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[gftp] marketing: target use case and target audience of gftp



Hello.

Glad to see someone who start to work on technical improvements. I wish
to help on the marketing side.

gftp have to have a clear target audience. A typical explanation of "is
just another ftp software" would win the audience who finds fun trying
yet another thing but not people who look for a tool for particular
case. Since gnome have ftp support, why bother to have an FTP software?
For me there are at least these reasons:

FEATURE LIST

   1. gftp offer fine-grain control over overwrite/continue/skip option
      on each files, when uploading lots of files. This is useful for
      website management.
   2. gftp endures broken connection better and show connection broken
      (instead of hiding it) on the user interface.
   3. gftp supports continue (reget, reput), good for transferring large
      files.

This list is incomplete, but is only concluded from my own use cases, I
hope other people contribute how they /uses/ (not only how they
develops) gftp, and get a complete use case table.

When we know the use case, we can conclude who are our target audience.
From above 3 use case I consider

TARGET AUDIENCE LIST

   1. web designers
   2. video file manager (transfer large file over network)
   3. those who suffer from low quality connection are the target users.

From this on we can further think what other features these target
audience would need. For example

FEATURE LIST BASED ON TARGET AUDIENCES

   1. a web designer might further need mirroring feature, removing
      files that was removed locally, she might also need exclusion file
      table in the bookmark to exclude '.svn' folders.
   2. video file manager might want to run gftp in system tray for a day
      or two, and get a report afterwards about upload progress. One can
      argue what she really need is gnu screen, but suppose she could
      not manage command line tools...
   3. those who suffer from low quality connection might need to
      download file in many runs, perhaps they need a feature to recover
      a transfer session after gftp restarted, by using, e.g. save
      current transfer progress to a file and restart it later.

This analysis gives two things:

LIST OF REASONS TO DO USE CASE ANALYSIS

   1. Developers know what feature they should work on if they intend to
      reach more users and help users solve more problems, or solve them
      better.
   2. Webmaster who run gftp website knows how to describe the product
      so that others decide to use it.

I did not get a full analysis done, there are many other use cases and
audiences that are not included, but you see my method, I had been
working on software requirement identification for many years, knows the
methods and can sense gftp have much more uses than it currently can
handle. I hope I can contribute by making it more popular on the means
other than developing code.