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Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

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Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#21

Post by gcb0 »

United857 wrote: post #11

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...

And then on the 90s you had icq, aol, yahoo and another dozen instant messagers. Then Google played the bait and switch with jabber support for gtalk and came social networks and everyone having a sms phone in their pockets and all that became irrelevant...

Did we just defined the instant messager life cycle in 10yrs?

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#22

Post by m_mueller »

We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity:

0) Acknowledge there is a problem.

1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end encryption for ALL major OSes (Mobile + Desktop).

2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it (without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising.

3)-5) Repeat for Voice.

6)-8) Repeat for Video.

Right now we're still at step 0) with TextSecure being the most promising at reaching 1). Each subsequent step becomes less and less likely to succeed, so I wouldn't bet any money that we have anything like that in the future. Maybe if MS released Skype as Open Source (which doesn't seem so unlikely anymore after yesterday's news).

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#23

Post by darklajid »

Semaphor wrote: post #13

It'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.

GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle.

Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my roster. Google and XMPP is dead, in my world.

Facebook? Well, I don't care what protocol they use if it doesn't allow federation. That's just another silo and XMPP is just a random implementation detail. The next version of Facebook's chat might switch to something else -> Just like Hangout did.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#24

Post by sirkneeland »

pzxc wrote: post #14
anonymoushn wrote: post #6

Earlier 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 (…

It's the inevitable turn of the wheel of history. The company on top inevitably succumbs to the desire to add some tie-in here, some lock-in there, some EEE all over... Meanwhile the company with less to lose sees less risk in opening up whatever they have to get traction...the only thing that changes is the name of the companies involved, and definitely not the human nature of the people running them.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. As of right now Google is still a considerably better and more accomplished OSS citizen than Microsoft. They deserve applause and success (and have certainly gotten plenty of both!). But in another few product cycles? Who knows...

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#25

Post by gcb0 »

pzxc wrote: post #14
anonymoushn wrote: post #6

Earlier 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 (…

Uh, didn't Google announce a long time ago that they shut down the xmpp end points because it was only used by spammers? Yeah the internet revolted for the 2 usual minutes but then a kitten passed by...

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#26

Post by Zash »

gcb0 wrote: post #21
United857 wrote: post #11

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...

And then on the 90s you had icq, aol, yahoo and another dozen instant messagers. Then Google played the bait and switch with jabber support for gtalk and came social networks and everyone having a sms phone in their pockets and all that became irrelevant... Did we just defined the instant messager life cycle in 10yrs?

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again .. and again .. and again ...

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#27

Post by gcb0 »

m_mueller wrote: post #22

We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity: 0) Acknowledge there is a problem. 1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end encryption for ALL major OSes (Mobile + Desktop). 2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it (without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising. 3)-5) Repeat for Voice. 6)-8) Repeat for Vi…

> Most promising at

Never heard..

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#28

Post by dagingaa »

jacoplane wrote: post #19

Isn't this what WebRTC will fix? http://www.webrtc.org/

No, not exactly. WebRTC has no concept of interoperability between services, only between clients. You need a signalling server to communicate the initial call between clients, and if you wish to connect clients across services, then those two services would need to connect to each other in some way, which is not detailed in the spec.

There are efforts to use SIP and XMPP for this, but that only solves the WebRTC-part. If you want SIP-clients to interconnect, you need expensive hardware/software to transcode the streams, and you loose the P2P-part. WebRTC is not a golden cow of interoperability between services.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#29

Post by gcb0 »

fenesiistvan wrote: post #15

We 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. Th…

When my friends tried to convince me i should pay for whatsapp i almost physically attacked one when i finally understood it was an im client.

So, yeah, you're spot on.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#30

Post by darklajid »

Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious.

WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are moving off of WhatsApp and end up (back?) with Skype, Threema, Telegram, Hangout, Facebook. No, not TextSecure. That's generally unknown all around me.

Out of these services I hate Skype, Hangout and Facebook with a passion. I like the Telegram marketing, but I'm skeptical and .. probably won't ever use it. Threema is the closed [1] thing I would consider, but even that is a compromise I'm not going to make.

For a long time now I'm telling my friends to 'just email me, or call'. Yes, I do use mail like IM all the time. It works, while all of the products above don't - for my definition of 'works'.

edit: 1: I meant 'closest', but 'closed' is such a good typo in that case - I'll leave it in. It's both.

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