Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#2>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication.
Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems worse now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revision.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#3I don't use apps. Does that make me a grandpa? I'm under 30. Too much coffee for this guy.
The last paragraph is cool, and I can visualize a day when you just want to contact someone async... or not in any medium and not have to worry about the network. The rant was pointless though.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#4If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#5It's odd that, despite there being an open protocol for realtime chat that is over 25 years old, older than HTTP or HTML, I would guess that the majority of the population hasn't heard of or used it. On the other hand, almost everyone has heard of and uses email, which also dates from around the same time period.
> A unified communication service would not only allow me to communicate easily on any device it makes sense to, it would also unify the 3 main communication formats into one platform: voice, video, and messaging.
The closest to that seems to be SIP and its related protocols, but they don't seem all that popular for some reason.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#6>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication. Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems worse now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revisi…
It is worse. If you try to run an online IM aggregator like the Meebo of old, Microsoft (Skype) will block your IPs and Blizzard (BNet chat) or Facebook (WhatsApp) will sue you off the face of the earth.
What's more, many services in this category have recently gone from trying to make the world better to trying to make it worse. eBuddy and imo.im shut down their IM aggregators entirely to build their own private IM networks, which, of course, are interoperable with nothing.
Disclaimer: I worked at imo.im
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#7If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.
Exactly. And, you can still fallback to text, email, or a phone call...
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#8If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.
Exactly. And, you can still fallback to text, email, or a phone call...
As long as your friends are not the kind of people who organise their lives on those services.
"Oh, you didn't know about the party? I told everyone on the whatsapp group chat (that you are not a part of)".
When these walled-garden communication channels become the de facto way of socialising then not being on them is a massive handicap. (As I know from my friends moaning at me for not having whatsapp)
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#9If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.
The problem is when you get taxed to do so. WhatsApp posed a much smaller tax ($2) than the potential tax you could have to pay to the telcos (roaming charges + SMS fees). This was the killer feature.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#10I just want to point out that our current internet is not http-based. It's ip-based. The World Wide Web is http-based but that's not the same as the Internet.
This would be nit-picking, except it's not. There is a global unified standard for communication. It's called the Internet Protocol (ip for short). If we moved SMS messages off SMS and onto ip we have WhatsApp (or any other superficially similar service). If you want to stop using SMS because it doesn't work over ip, then there are a few dozen messaging apps that will run on your phone and allow you to send and receive messages over ip. This, after all, was the driver behind WhatsApp's growth: the data bandwidth involved in sending a message is massively cheaper than SMS charges for the same message.
A single google search revealed a whole page allowing you to send and receive SMS messages from iPad or desktop if that's the problem.
So, basically, as far as I can see it's not the networks preventing this. It's the users. Stop sending SMS messages and urge all your friends to move to any one of a dozen non-SMS message formats and you're done.