Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could only email, message and communicate members within each service.
Back to the future...
Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#12I 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 yo…
You're confusing network layer standardization (IP) with the application layer (HTTP, etc.)
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#13It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#14>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…
I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on my own what I might have done to get my account disabled.
The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (over gtalk XMPP) is only used for this one thing -- Pidgin IM with my coworkers. 2 of my coworkers google accounts they created for this purpose were also disabled on the same day. When I created a new google account, it was disabled within an hour.
My normal personal google account I use for gmail, and my business google account I use for google apps, still works without a hitch. The only thing I can assume, is that Google no longer allows you to use them exclusively for XMPP instant messaging - unless you use their google talk interface built into gmail.
Especially frustrating because there is no way to tell if this is true. I'm just taking a guess, because that's all I can do. If there's some other reason my account might have been disabled, there's no way for me to find out. Now I'm worried about the lifespan of my other google accounts. Don't really know what to do, because Google won't give me any information about what I did wrong. But it makes me afraid they might one day shut down my gmail account also, without telling me why or giving me any means to find out why.
Some google products I like, and some I don't. I hate google+, for example. But webmail is something I rely on, and until yesterday, gmail was such a slick implementation that I had no reason to investigate using anything else. Now I realize relying on a behemoth corp for something that's mission-critical (to me) may no longer be acceptable.
It's ironic and a little bit weird (in a Twilight Zone kind of way), that Google seems to be behaving more and more like the Microsoft of old, and yet I'm watching the annual MS developer conference that's taking place this week (channel9.msdn.com for the video), and the things they're doing -- git support in team foundation server, universal apps built in JS that work on pc/tablet/phone/xbox (and maybe ios/android soon through cooperation with xamarin), open-sourcing the .net compiler, etc -- make them seem like more like the google of a decade ago.
Creepy. I'm not sure how to react.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#15We already have open standards for unified communication: H.323 (old), XMPP and SIP.
Also there are a lot of companies using and/or offering great software based on these open protocols: check Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/) or Mizutech full stack offer (http://www.mizu-voip.com/).
There is only one problem: When VoIP companies grows, all of them are switching to (at least partially) proprietary protocols.
There is a big hype now around Twilio. However there were apps like that even before solving the same problem. For example mizutech SIP webphone also has a nice javascript API and it is completely SIP compatible (without the need to use any third party obfuscating cloud service like in the case of Twilio. It will just connect directly to any SIP server ...without the cloud hype).
It just seems that technology or open protocols doesn't matter too much. The winner solution was and always will be the solution offered by the company with better marketing.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#16How about the web as a communication platform? Check out awesometalk.com for video, for example. No need to install anything, besides a compatible browser, of course :)
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on my own what I might have done to get my account disabled. The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (…
One possibility is that you and your coworkers are creating multiple google accounts which are being used from the same IP (your work's IP) simultaneously, and since there isn't any history (like email, search, etc) on those accounts then you're setting off Google's spam detector.
Not a good situation. I agree that it sucks. But... well, honestly and unfortunately, your best bet is to write a blog post about the injustice and hope HN picks it up.
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#18Can I read this article? No, I'm on a smartphone :) (no mobile version of the site)
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#19Isn't this what WebRTC will fix? http://www.webrtc.org/
Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
#20Isn't this what WebRTC will fix? http://www.webrtc.org/
No. It just makes it easier to build even more services that can't talk to each other. What we need are federated services, like email and XMPP.