MSN Messenger was the future of messaging
ICQ was the future of messaging
IRC was the future of messaging
Smoke signals were the future of messaging
Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
161–170 of 295 posts
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#162Just 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?
Jabber/XMPP has a number of problems that make it unsuitable for modern chat environments where clients (read: smartphones) have poor connections and frequently want to sleep to conserve power.
For example, XMPP wants an always-on TCP connection between the client and the server for the client to appear "online". There's an extension which allows for sleeping, but having async mobile connections in an extension means that you need the right pair of server and client to enable this feature. Plus, there's no handling of syncing messages between multiple clients. If you've got a smartphone and a desktop client, to compete with Facebook Messenger you need detailed conversation transcripts on both clients -- and an intelligent way to ping your clients and tell which should receive sound notifications.
see more at https://op-co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#163Federated system are nice but clients for Jabber have very different quality. Some would support things you like others don't. For example iChat will always sent the background and forground colour of the chat bubbles with the message. If you added a photo to a Google Talk conversation, some people could see it others don't.
I kinda liked what Moxie once wrote: the notification area of your mobile device is the new multi protocol client and since most IM services are using identifiers like phone number or email address instead of user names, the barrier to switch a service is lower. This is the one big advantage to use the user's address book as a social graph for IM.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#164For those who remember, it wasn't Gchat the "Slack" of Google but a project called Google Wave.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.
Text messages are very slow, and nobody minds. People on iMessage don't see the difference. It's more a metter of perception. When you click on a mail, it takes a lot of time to type, then your UI have a delay to say it's sent, then you have this time taken by many clients to move your mail to the proper folder. But a proper mail-chat client would just make the message appear as sent, then to all the stuff in backgro…
Would email providers block chat-over-email after you sent 1000 or so messages in the space of an hour?
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. Build a whatsapp bridge for matrix? I mean, it's built for the exact case where people aren't "on" it.
The problem is Whatsapp is actively hostile to any kind of attempts to creating 3rd party clients or APIs.
So was AIM, though. That didn't stop the third party clients.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.
Text messages are very slow, and nobody minds. People on iMessage don't see the difference. It's more a metter of perception. When you click on a mail, it takes a lot of time to type, then your UI have a delay to say it's sent, then you have this time taken by many clients to move your mail to the proper folder. But a proper mail-chat client would just make the message appear as sent, then to all the stuff in backgro…
people on iMessage see the difference between SMS and iMessage ALL THE TIME! I have friends that refuse to respond to my SMS messages in iMessage, since I have an android phone - We use FB Messenger to communicate instead.
Users are extremely sensitive to latency. I would ditch a chat client with any real latency in a heartbeat.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. Build a whatsapp bridge for matrix? I mean, it's built for the exact case where people aren't "on" it.
The problem is Whatsapp is actively hostile to any kind of attempts to creating 3rd party clients or APIs.
Wasn't really a problem with ICQ, even though they had actively struggled and tried to change protocols frequently (and broke unofficial clients once in few months).
The community was large, and there was a significant demand for good clients (official one was shit). I guess now the difference must be that either official client is good enough for most users, or that users' attitude to how they want things had changed and they learned to submit to whatever service providers dictate.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#169We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble, works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one: emails. You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.
E-mails take an eternity to send and receive compared to IM.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exte…
I am hoping the Matrix team will write a blog post about their viewpoint on Moxie's post, given that they are out to do something Moxie doesn't believe can succeed. I'm also curious to hear how they respond to the specific section you quoted: how is Matrix going to avoid the same fate XMPP suffered here?