Comment 5 for bug 449916

Julien Lavergne wrote:
 > I am agree that it should be fixed in empathy, but this is quite more intrusive .....
 > Also, this change in empathy will break others theme icons if they don't provide "fall back" to user-* icons.

This is not true , as the change has been planned to move to the standard xdg naming specs , Themes will have to update at some point or the other... Upstream just hasnt got around to fixing it.
Also , the user-* names are to be used by all IM apps.

Another factor to remember , is that the default theme is not allowed to have app specific icons . Icons in the default theme are mostly generic. Previously, Humanity had several app specific icons , UX team had them removed.