111–120 of 132 posts
This web client, even in it's current horrific form, is something I really needed. Many a times I find myself working on my laptop, with the phone carelessly lying somewhere else in the room. It's a pain to go find it when a new message arrives. The bottomline is, I guess WhatsApp doesn't need a Web Client to compete with other services. If you've been to India, you will realize how pervasive WhatsApp is, with or wit…
Can it be a money issue? Remembering that WhatsApp is not free, the 1$ for a year of service should be how they make money (I think they did a very good job there because no one that I know remembers that). Maybe the on-line phone solution suits them technically and economically, because they don't want to provide you with an alternative client that you might use for free. As they say this is simply and extension of…
I don't think it's that no-one remembers that, but I don't think WhatsApp actually enforces this seriously. I have never paid for the service and each time the deadline for doing so approached, it had been extended.
Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this. > And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards. Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but…
The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.
This web client, even in it's current horrific form, is something I really needed. Many a times I find myself working on my laptop, with the phone carelessly lying somewhere else in the room. It's a pain to go find it when a new message arrives. The bottomline is, I guess WhatsApp doesn't need a Web Client to compete with other services. If you've been to India, you will realize how pervasive WhatsApp is, with or wit…
Me too! Sadly, as an iOS user, I can't have it.
I would be interested to understand more about why WhatsApp made some of those decisions. The requirement to keep your phone connected to the Internet seems strange, perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device? Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? Why has iOS been left out?
- If you allow two clients online at the same time, you need to support "carbon copy" meaning you need to send the messages to all the clients and keep the status of the messages in sync. This will take a lot of processing on the server side.
- When a client offline for a long time goes online, you also need to sync from the server all the messages that were sent during the client is offline.
So their architecture was built in such a way that the processing power on the server side is limited to the minimum. I believe that they may change its strategy in the future. However, it will take time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this. > And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards. Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but…
The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.
Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
All the nerds here only think about standards etc. Don't forget whatsapp is a company and it has to protect its market. Without controlling all the clients, whatsapp is worth a lot less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate the gifs.. Made the article almost unreadable.. Just have them loop once or twice when I scroll to that part of the article.
Thanks for the feedback. The gifs are the way I use to express my sentiments without reverting to cursing in all languages I know. I am aware that they are not every ones cup of tea but I liked them. I will consider not abusing gifs in the future (even though I love them and will probably use).
Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
All the nerds here only think about standards etc. Don't forget whatsapp is a company and it has to protect its market. Without controlling all the clients, whatsapp is worth a lot less.
When communication service instead of enhancing communication tries to hinder it by intentionally gutting interoperability, one should avoid it like a plague.