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Overrun With Messaging Apps

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11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#11
post #9

A pretty relevant article about what myself and temas are working on now: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-... IMO, interop/federation is going to be a tremendous long-term effort and include many standards, but is definitely feasible, inevitable even. There's a lot of innovation happening in messaging again thanks to mobile, we just need to start taking the best of what we've all learned a…

Layer seems interesting but I think the reason XMPP ultimately succeeded was because of federation and a healthy open source ecosystem. We are drafting a federated, minimal knowledge push server design for privacy-minded chat apps: https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-Push-Server/tree/ma... (a little out of date)

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is standard. Grab a client for the platform of your choice [0], open an account on ddg.gg (duckduckgo's xmpp server), and you're done. I personnally use pidgin on the desktop and chatsecure on Android. The only thing XMPP is lacking is marketing. Multi-billion-dollars-level marketing; shouldn't be too hard to do, right ? [0] http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/

XMPP is not technically well-suited to mobile devices. It was designed with a base-level assumption that any client will maintain a constant TCP connection in order to receive messages. This doesn't fit well with mobile devices, which spend most of their time 'off' and try to have as little software running concurrently as possible in order to save battery life. Some mobile XMPP clients have come up with various clev…

We are working on a federated, protocol agnostic push server design here: https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-Push-Server/tree/ma...

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#13
Google is making a play too, with Hangouts now handling SMS. Although the people I've talked to who try that hate it, because it often sends a chat message when they wanted to text the person. Texts are just seen as much more personal and immediate where are chat texts aren't much different from email.

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#15
post #13

Google is making a play too, with Hangouts now handling SMS. Although the people I've talked to who try that hate it, because it often sends a chat message when they wanted to text the person. Texts are just seen as much more personal and immediate where are chat texts aren't much different from email.

Maybe they should put a big SMS label on it so you know, or put "SMS 000-000-0000" at the top to signify it's an SMS chat rather than the Hangout. (This is how it is today, btw)

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#16
post #5

Everythign old is new again. Remember the days of MSN vs ICQ vs AIM etc etc etc?

RIP MSN. When I was a teenager I used to spend all day in a group chat with some friends. I think the feature I miss the most is the custom emoticons.

I've since moved onto Skype's group chat, but nothing I've comes close to MSN. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#17
post #5

Everythign old is new again. Remember the days of MSN vs ICQ vs AIM etc etc etc?

RIP MSN. When I was a teenager I used to spend all day in a group chat with some friends. I think the feature I miss the most is the custom emoticons. I've since moved onto Skype's group chat, but nothing I've comes close to MSN. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

It's funny, I have a WP7 phone and the lack an MS-blessed messaging system sticks out. You use Facebook account if you want to send messages through the Internet instead of SMS using the built-in features of the OS.

They bought Skype after the OS was created and never gave it the kind of deep bindings into the OS that other popular social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) got.

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is standard. Grab a client for the platform of your choice [0], open an account on ddg.gg (duckduckgo's xmpp server), and you're done. I personnally use pidgin on the desktop and chatsecure on Android. The only thing XMPP is lacking is marketing. Multi-billion-dollars-level marketing; shouldn't be too hard to do, right ? [0] http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/

XMPP is not technically well-suited to mobile devices. It was designed with a base-level assumption that any client will maintain a constant TCP connection in order to receive messages. This doesn't fit well with mobile devices, which spend most of their time 'off' and try to have as little software running concurrently as possible in order to save battery life. Some mobile XMPP clients have come up with various clev…

XMPP never got to the point where it was good enough at video, audio, or even large chatrooms, and so other chat clients took the initiative.

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#19

What really disappoints me about the current crop of VC funded messaging apps is that none of them care very strongly about user privacy. Even apps that claim to keep your messages "encrypted" are closed source and don't include details about their encryption techniques. There are open source encrypted messaging apps like ChatSecure [1][2], and TextSecure [3] but they lack some of the modern vanity features that user…

It's amazing the most crucial applications in our day to day lives are absolutely awful. Why is there not a great messenger application available, that's simple, well designed, and secures our data? Why is there not a proper alternative to Skype, offering free group video calling, while protecting our privacy? Why does e-mail feel so dated and sloppy? I sent out a handful of e-mails last week, my mail server said they were sent, but none of the recipients received them. I sent another message to a friend the other month, and she missed it because it went to her spam folder. Why do I even receive spam? I know you can setup a whitelist only, but why isn't this more of a standard, where I build a contact list with friends, and we can leave messages back and forth, receive proper confirmation they're received, read, etc. It would be nice if I could login to my e-mail, and see I have 20 friends, 10 sites that are able to message me, and then manage that list by adding or removing.

We have some incredible apps and software out there, but the most important ones are those lacking the most.

Re: Overrun With Messaging Apps

#20

What really disappoints me about the current crop of VC funded messaging apps is that none of them care very strongly about user privacy. Even apps that claim to keep your messages "encrypted" are closed source and don't include details about their encryption techniques. There are open source encrypted messaging apps like ChatSecure [1][2], and TextSecure [3] but they lack some of the modern vanity features that user…

sorry for the self promotion.I am working on wrinq a meesaging service that values privacy. You can check it out here http://www.wrinq.com/
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