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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

#231

Post by Godel_unicode »

pdkl95 wrote: post #82
zardeh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait are you saying that XMPP was forced out (solely) by Google, and that Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" market? Not to mention that XMPP is a standard, not a competitor. This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.

> (solely) by Google I didn't say anything about other players in the "chat" market. > Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" No, the have dominance in the email market (I mentioned gmail). They used the position of power in the email market to limit XMPP and support their new Hangouts service. Just like Microsoft used to do, Google broke their support of the protocol. While most of the protocol sti…

> note that this doesn't require a perfect monopoly in the first market

There's no such thing, that's a strawman to permit calling things monopolies when they aren't. Given that Google allegedly tried to act like a monopoly and totally failed, I suggest that you rethink your view.

> An open (federated) protocol is the most dangerous kind of competitor to a big company like Google.

You mean protocols like SMTP and HTTPS, protocols which are core to Google's business? This was not a company with a monopoly in one area leveraging it to gain advantage in another. Google was not even close to a monopoly (or even a plurality) in email; Yahoo for one had more users at the time than Gmail.

This was Google admitting that open wasn't working and going private to try and retain existing users. Which, not having anything close to a monopoly, was perfectly legal. One could even argue it was their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to try and grow the user base.

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

#232

Post by zanny »

Freak_NL wrote: post #186
StavrosK wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenID Connect supports discoverability, which enables a protocol like Mozilla Persona to work over it. That's exactly what some others and I are working on, hopefully we will make some headway and greatly increase the usability of authentication again.

Sounds like a good initiative, be sure to post on HN when you reach significant milestones. What I worry about with OpenID Connect on the open internet (as opposed to OpenID Connect used in a corporate setting, or to provide single sign-on solutions for specific partnered services) is how it almost always results in a service asking you to use Google or Facebook to authenticate, with huge coloured buttons, followed b…

They only provide Google / Facebook buttons because they are by far the most popular option. In practice the vast majority of major online web services support some from of openid / oauth signon, from Github to Steam to Wordpress and more.

As a site developer, it is your job to figure out what buttons your user demographic will use. If it is all facebook / google, then provide those, and most of these sites know providing more obscure options only confuses their potential users.

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

#233

Post by inputmice »

Arathorn wrote: post #208
inputmice wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Claiming that matrix needs 5-10 years to be 'usable' seemed to be unnecessarily and unproductively negative, hence my objection to badmouthing when we could instead be working together productively :) The last thing decentralised comms needs is in-fighting. I think the root of the contention here is that you don't seem to understand what Matrix does - this is probably my fault for failing to explain it better to you…

I'm just wondering what makes someone look at an XMPP client like Conversations and say: "This is fundamental flawed let's completely reinvent the wheel. There is no way we can ever get a good UX out of this" Matrix might not be a bad protocol for Instant Messaging. But neither is XMPP. And XMPP already has an established infrastructure of public servers and a fairly large user base which will take Matrix at least 5-10 years to build up (That's were the 5-10 years were coming from).

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

#234

Post by Bromskloss »

RileyKyeden wrote: post #219
voltagex_ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution https://core.telegram.org/api

I just installed the Telegram app. Why is it asking for my phone number?

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

#235

Post by rglullis »

calanya wrote: post #79
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…

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?

Always connected? I really envy you.

I mean, can you even take the subway or go on an overseas travel and still be sure that your smartphone is your single point of failure?

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

#236

Post by Bromskloss »

bazqux2 wrote: post #30
zatkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.

XMPP is a poor protocol. I can completely understand why they would want to break compatibility.

Is there anything particular about XMPP that is poor?

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

#237

Post by aiiane »

jhgg wrote: post #138
aftbit wrote: post #46

Who 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)

It'd be nice if you all had a stronger story for how you're going to stay afloat long term. "Stickers, lol" isn't very much of one.

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

#238

Post by aiiane »

kuschku wrote: post #212
mike_hearn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The big issue for you, perhaps - but the reality is that most users simply don't care about that.

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

#239

Post by zanny »

smoyer wrote: post #173
chris_wot wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm still using XMPP to connect to GChat ... I use it every workday (via Pidgin).

You can still somewhat use it, but it does not work well. Groupchats do not work at all anymore, and there is no message synchronization over it so any Hangouts client will populate messages an XMPP client never sees, and you cannot request chat history from the remote.

It is definitely not a high quality XMPP experience. If you want to use XMPP, you should probably be using duckduckgo's XMPP offering.

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

#240

Post by zanny »

Bromskloss wrote: post #234
RileyKyeden wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convince them to get Telegram. It works on most devices, and has extensibility built in: https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution https://core.telegram.org/api

I just installed the Telegram app. Why is it asking for my phone number?

They use phone number as account name rather than email on mobile.
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