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Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#151

Post by y0ghur7_xxx »

inputmice wrote: post #123

Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations ( https://Conversations.im ) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…

conversations is really nice. thanks for making it. one problem i have with it, that gchat solves really well, is how it behaves when you have a desktop client and conversations open at the same time.

when someone using conversations writes to me, what i expect is that i get the message on my desktop, as well as on my mobile client. but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message, if on my phone or on my desktop client. this should not happen. it should just send it without the resource set, and let the xmpp server figure it out.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#152

Post by nroets »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #85
mmastrac wrote: post #6

We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to t…

What Google failed to realize is that people want chat that's connected to other services they frequently use. I'm already browsing FB so it's easy to chat with my FB friends using Messenger rather than both pop over to another service. The same reason why MSFT has tried (much less successfully) to incorporate its chat offerings into Office365 and the reason it bought Skype. Google was in a position to capture the ch…

Great theory. Except that outside the US people who are FB friends tell each other "I want to chat, give me your number so I can add you on WhatsApp". Outside the US, WhatsApp is winning because of network effects.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#153

Post by Freak_NL »

chris_wot wrote: post #130
lqdc13 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that username/password is still the only choice for privacy minded people.

Google Talk did have XMPP functionality, which allowed for SASL. [1] But of course, they killed this off because they wanted to dominate chat and messaging with their own proprietary protocol. If they had not followed this strategy they would be killing in this market, even whilst supporting XMPP Federation. But they have chosen to release multiple proprietary products, so they aren't the lead in the market. Silly of…

I doubt the decision to close up their protocols was taking lightly. You can bet that user lock-in is part of their current strategy.

Did any Google engineers ever reveal Google's true intentions for shutting down their XMPP offerings?

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#154

Post by herbst »

mike_hearn wrote: post #142
inopinatus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Featur…

I may live in a nerd specific environment but gchat was our goto product for a long while. We had our notifications build in trough XMPP just like people do with slack now. Some of us used their own XMPP servers, and pretty much everyone was reachable trough it beeing google and everybody having a gmail and/or android phone at least. There were also several cool mobile and web apps that worked very well for XMPP, though not with high load thats true.

When you removed XMPP and forced to hangout it died off pretty fast, no API and the Hangout thingy was not even working on Linux (not sure if it does these days, i never tried).

I see your points, but i cant stop to think about this as the probably most evil step google did to my workflow.

Edit:// I use hangout now to transport links from phone to desktop and the other way around. It totally lost its purpose :/

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#155

Post by StavrosK »

PeterisP wrote: post #149
Perceptes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. The only practically usable homeserver software right now is Synapse ( https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse ), an implementation in Python built by the Matrix core developer team.

So, why did you answer "Sure" to his question if the answer is actually "No, you can not run a homeserver right now on your smartphone" ? I mean, a python app for posix systems is not really close to being run on unrooted android and iOS.

It was a "sure, in principle".

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#156

Post by amelius »

Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#157

Post by nly »

reuven wrote: post #113

When Slack first came out, and everyone got all excited about it, I was quite skeptical. I've been using Skype (and lots of other IM systems) for years; do I really want or need something new? The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop, in my browser, and on my phone. So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did i…

Ultimately slack is just a proprietary IRC, with a solution for message persistence falling out its centralized design. IRCCloud and ZNC both solve the same problem. Its slick as hell, but still a walled garden.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#158

Post by 4ad »

leni536 wrote: post #117
mmastrac wrote: post #6

We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to t…

> When Google dropped XMPP AFAIK they only dropped federation and support, but I still can connect with any XMPP client.

"Only".

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#159

Post by Perceptes »

PeterisP wrote: post #149
Perceptes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. The only practically usable homeserver software right now is Synapse ( https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse ), an implementation in Python built by the Matrix core developer team.

So, why did you answer "Sure" to his question if the answer is actually "No, you can not run a homeserver right now on your smartphone" ? I mean, a python app for posix systems is not really close to being run on unrooted android and iOS.

I somehow didn't process the "it's a smartphone part" and completely misunderstood his question as a result. I'll edit my original reply to correct that. Edit: Apparently I can't edit it anymore. :{

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#160

Post by cpach »

amelius wrote: post #156
Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?

Moxie Marlinspike recently published an interesting essay that adressed this question.

”XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a ’living standard.’ Despite its capacity for protocol ’extensions,’ however, it's undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can't realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven't those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

Like any federated protocol, extensions don't mean much unless everyone applies them, and that's an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren't consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone's choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn't support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn't only effect them, it effects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.”

https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

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