GChat was painful to use. IRC and Jabber are the predecessors.
Google Talk was based on Jabber, so you could log in to it via any Jabber / XMPP client.
Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
191–200 of 295 posts
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
We haven't had a chance to write a formal response yet; too busy getting Matrix out of beta. I responded at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669681 though. A quick specific answer w.r.t. XMPP is that Matrix aims for a very coarser granularity of modularity, published as a single consistent spec, and mandates feature profiles to determine which modules should get used where. In other words, there is…
Thanks for the response and the link to the previous response. I'd missed that! Both are great answers. :}
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#193Before 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…
This is a confinement of OTR. OTR was never made for modern day instant messaging. Use OMEMO or send unencrypted messages and you won't have this problem.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#194Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#195Just 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…
I really like the ideas behind Matrix. Sure, the existing (open) clients aren't all that sexy, and synapse can be a bit slow sometimes. But implementing your own client is a breeze and bridging other networks through application services makes it incredibly powerful.
My experience with the matrix.org community has been very pleasant so far. Keep up the good work, folks!
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number […] To me this translates to: “Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that john.doe@gmail.com is the same person as feetfetish33 so we can better quantify you for targeted advertising.” I am willing to entertain the notion…
> we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people.
What to do if people (majority) don't care ?
Because that's the side result of bringing uneducated (regarding IT) masses online. They sell on instant gratification, cute shit (emojis, gifs galore) and hype. In return they don't hesitate to give their data and conversations.
No wonder everyone want's their own silo.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#197Before 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…
inputmice: I hear your Conversations app is really nice, and it's great to see XMPP is evolving well. Rather than being defensive about XMPP and badmouthing matrix, perhaps we can just bridge both ecosystems and both sides and clients benefit from wider reach? Especially when some tech like interoperable E2E ratchet implementations is of direct use for both ecosystems. The two protocols have entirely different design…
I'm not bad mouthing anything. It's just that Matrix doesn't solve any problems XMPP hasn't already solved or could have solved with an extension. Matrix is basically a pointer to a stream of messages. You could have easily made this into a XEP. In fact there have been ideas in the XMPP community called MAM subscriptions that are basically the same thing.
Even if that extension would have been a radical change in C2S communication as long as S2S stays the same you could have built your protocol on an existing infrastructure.
I mean I rather have people use matrix than a closed system like WhatsApp or Signal. But I honestly don't see the point for developing a new protocol other than JSON over HTTP fits better into the zeitgeist and NIH syndrome.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#198Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
Although it's not open sourced, you should check out discord ( https://discordapp.com/ ). Although our niche is gamers, lots of people use Discord for tons of other things. We've got all those things except search (but we're working on it!) (disclosure: i work there)
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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number […] To me this translates to: “Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that john.doe@gmail.com is the same person as feetfetish33 so we can better quantify you for targeted advertising.” I am willing to entertain the notion…
I have yet to encounter a chat network that uses targeted advertising, so you're well off into the realm of conspiracy theories there.
Chat networks are all moving to the use of phone numbers because users mobile phonebooks are a vendor neutral, open access social network of high value contacts that almost everyone has and for which there are simple APIs available.
Phone numbers have other advantages. They are difficult to register in bulk (it can be done but it costs a lot more than bulk registering web accounts protected only by a CAPTCHA). Regulations in many part of the world enforce the ability to do number porting which makes mobile numbers truly user owned - unlike email or jabber ids which are ultimately owned by the organisation after the @ symbol. There is a simple remote attestation protocol: you can prove you own the identifier by simply providing a challenge code. Everyone understands them. And it outsources identity management costs to the telcos who have large branch/shop networks to help people who e.g. lose their device/SIM. Building out and staffing account recovery infrastructures is a significant driver of costs for large web platforms. For instance if you have a contract then you can recover your identity by physically walking into a local telco shop with your passport, you will walk out with a replacement SIM (and the prior SIM remotely deactivated) a few minuets later. It's partly by shifting these costs to the telco networks that WhatsApp was able to scale to hundreds of millions of users with only 50 employees.
When I look at how things work done this way vs a traditional internet federated network like email, Jabber, IRC etc, I have to agree with Moxie - it's not so bad, actually. I'm not normally a big supporter of government regulations, but making number porting obligatory is a relatively low cost rule that makes the use of phone numbers as the universal id a lot more palatable, because it's truly user owned at that point. Switching mobile networks and switching chat networks is a lot easier than switching email/xmpp providers because forwarding has always been an afterthought in such protocols, is legally optional, and at any rate is always going to be more complicated than just re-assigning ownership of a truly provider independent code.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 problem is, without actual numbers - how many clients support what - this statement is just a personal opinion, not a rule. We can say exactly the same about the w…
There is the w3 and other standards comitties joined by industrie leaders and a lot of experts and public eyeballs. Chat hardly compares. Perhaps the W3 should concern itself with chat. The IETF released SIP. The w3c offers IRC channels.
A broken browser is a pain, new standars improve the user experience (e.g. html video). For the public user there is no discernable difference in any basic chat's protocol and implemetation.