XMPP is a zombie protocol. Yes, it has clients that have better implementation of instant messaging and presence than any other, but it falls apart with real time communication such as voice and video (lol jingle) and there is no practical way of iteroperating with the PSTN. Further, federation of plain text and basic presence worked, but rarely anything more. Connecting with federated users makes no sense to end users, first they have to know it is possible, then they have to figure out how it works and then they learn most features don't work. Even if that wasn't awful enough, it was all dropped by the providers and no longer works.
All commercial platforms are moving away from the protocol, and SIP is now the standard. Problem is that it isn't a great chat protocol for end devices (no standard concept for buddy lists being stored on a server or mobile clients, but many proprietary extensions work well).
As for slack, it is a group chat with slick interface, other than the bizarre account/domain design. It has no encryption of data at rest, and I really wouldn't use it for confidential data. If you are going to use a proprietary closed source solution, at least consider using Cisco Spark.
Now Matrix, it is almost too good to be true, grass roots open standards, federation that makes sense, encryption by design and doesn't lock users into yet another captive island (YACI?). It is also built with the concepts of accounts/SSO, true federation, real time communications in mind. I dream of the day we can kill the PSTN, but with something even more open... Sadly none of the commercial players today are interested. Any one company that thinks they will do it on their own has fallen for their own delusions. Microsoft Skype, Whatsapp and a hapless Google Hangouts... What a mess.
Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
211–220 of 295 posts
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. I don't know the numbers but I'm part of the population that never used Facebook, so I'm unconvinced you can generalize like that. > Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value. I didn't really unders…
Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away.…
But interop doesn’t fix the issue of federation.
If I want to chat with person X, I either have to use the same client as them, or I can’t do it.
I can’t write my own, better client, either.
That’s the big issue.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#213Just 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 have a computer which is always on and always connected. It's my smartphone. Can I just run a 'homeserver' on that and be connected?
If you are on Android or iOS, it’s not always connected – and you can’t actually run things in background all the time anymore either.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
WhatsApp came to Europe at a time when there was a strong need to replace badly overpriced SMS. In the US most telco's offered subscriptions with free, unlimited SMS and WhatsApp didn't provide any immediate benefit. Facebook Messenger came later, but had the ability to send messages without contact information, giving people in the US a reason to adopt it.
By now, most people in Europe also have Messenger, but still mainly use WhatsApp (slightly generalising). I think that primarily comes down to WhatsApp being a much better messenging app. It's quick, reliable, easy to use, power-efficient, small, well-integrated into the OS, secure, and most importantly: media sharing just works.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#215I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo. I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like a…
> On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. I don't get this. Just because you're using a device that has historically been tied to a specific method of identification doesn't mean that you have to limit yourself to that? Should desktop chat clients start only identifying people by IP addresses?
Indeed. Nearly all phone-number-as-identity services fail at allowing multiple clients (Whatsapp and Signal have at least something, but not perfect either), which is probably the biggest issue I have with newer messengers.
And it makes changing my phone number more annoying, for IMHO no good reason. Allow people to configure their phone number for discovery if they want, but don't make it the primary identifier.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives. I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural…
What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp? Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> […] 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 diffic…
Skype shows advertisement in the chat window, most likely targeted.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. Since a critical feature of a messaging app is "my friends are on it", that gave MSN/FB/AIM a huge advantage over GChat, and had they not turned off XMPP integration, they would have bled off users until it was only used by small pockets of people, all of whom were on GChat (eg. Googlers).
> People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. How this had worked? I mean, in XMPP both parties need a JID, so MSN users must have had theirs. Had MSN had generated random non-discoverable JIDs for their users, blocked any incoming messages unless there were prior outgoing communications, made GChat interop opt-in or what?
I'm also confused by that statement, especially as I was using msn over xmpp up until that died two years ago or however much it was.
I think maybe the grandparent was saying that you couldn't add msn friends to your contact in gtalk, but you could add gtalk friends to your msn. Or maybe its something to do with emoticons?
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is Whatsapp is actively hostile to any kind of attempts to creating 3rd party clients or APIs.
Exactly, and this is the problem with the state of messaging in 2016. The companies have built their walled gardens and are now actively defending them against "outsiders". It's to the point where I've considered buying an iDevice just to communicate with a few friends on iMessage.
Convince them to get Telegram. It works on most devices, and has extensibility built in:
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 implem…
IETF has also standartized XMPP.