Protocol is a technical detail that we don't want to expose in the contact. Furtheremore, once we'll have meta-contacts, this information will make no sense any more.

Protocol is not only a technical detail. It is also a social detail which a LOT of people care dearly about. For many reasons(personal and productive), I do not want to mix up a contact I have on MSN that is also on AIM or YAHOO with the same name. With over 1200 contacts throughout all my service accounts, Finding a contact by name and the service they are on is crucial. Seeing thousands of the same non-informational icon does nothing but take up space. Put the icon to good use.

I am not asking to make it default, but to at least add it in as an optional, non-default feature.

This feature/issue was a hotspot with the pidgin project as well. The developers there were of the same mindset that if they personally prefer to have the same non-informational generic icon for all contacts, then everyone else will prefer that too and what they say goes. They also tried to say that adding the feature back in was a very difficult task that required a rewrite of crucial parts of the code. This was not true as proven by the Carrier IM project where they added the feature back in with no problems at all.

Marking this bug as a dup of bug #603877 as it has a patch and I suggested a way to properly implement this.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 603877 ***