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Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#271

Post by mike_hearn »

petra wrote: post #223
mike_hearn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away.…

All those are true, but still iMessage is an important reason for many to pay more for an iPhone. So still it's pretty hard to create an attractive alternative, wouldn't you say ?

I've heard that WhatsApp isn't used as much in America. I live in Europe and do not believe I have any friends who use iMessage, or if they do, they are all on WhatsApp as well, which would seem to prove Moxie's point.

But then again in Europe iPhone market share is much lower.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#272

Post by mike_hearn »

dredmorbius wrote: post #204
mike_hearn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to encounter a chat network that uses targeted advertising, so you're well off into the realm of conspiracy theories there. Chat networks are all moving to the use of phone numbers because users mobile phonebooks are a vendor neutral, open access social network of high value contacts that almost everyone has and for which there are simple APIs available. Phone numbers have other advantages. They are diffic…

Phones are dying. Too inconvenient, too much spam, pants vendors, pervasive surveillance, pants call and voice quality, and a phone is too small for a tablet. It's got a few years yet, but POTS and mobile are already legacy, they just don't know it yet.

Phones are dying?

Better hope Apple shareholders don't find out!

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#273

Post by mike_hearn »

cm3 wrote: post #209
mike_hearn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away.…

That makes more sense, thanks. Re sharing contacts by replacing User@Domain with numbers: Yes, this solves some of it because everyone agreed to use phone numbers, but phone numbers are a thing of the past and you don't always want to share your phone number just for messaging. Re notification overhead: If you have a system-wide notification display system, then of course the resources it requires are limited but you…

Android notifications do not require any app to be running in order for them to be displayed.

lockin still exists because you are the whim of centrally managed for-profit messaging backends

Given that 99.99% of people will never run their own servers, this is irrelevant: someone will be managing the infrastructure and those people will be motivated by profit. Welcome to capitalism: it works better than the alternatives despite its flaws.

Things like WhatsApp or GChat do not simply replace XML with JSON. They tend to use binary protocols designed for low power consumption and ease of parsing. Arguably, if any protocol gets it wrong, it's XMPP ... I used to like it back when it was called Jabber, heck, I even hung out with a few Jabber developers back in the day. But Jabber's design goal was instant messaging and it's no longer useful for that. It just couldn't adapt to even quite small changes in circumstances.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#274

Post by smcnally »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #166
reitanqild wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is Whatsapp is actively hostile to any kind of attempts to creating 3rd party clients or APIs.

So was AIM, though. That didn't stop the third party clients.

AOL worked actively to stop third-party AIM clients in the same ways as mentioned above from icq through WhatsApp -- changing protocols and central auth mechanisms.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/06/aol.vsms.idg/index...

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/24/business/fi-59086

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#275

Post by inopinatus »

mike_hearn wrote: post #201
cm3 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. I don't know the numbers but I'm part of the population that never used Facebook, so I'm unconvinced you can generalize like that. > Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value. I didn't really unders…

Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away.…

It's still federated identity. Phone numbers are a federated structure, but the federation occurs at the level of telcos and nations; you are denied the opportunity of self-management. They also predate the domain name system, making them the "traditional" format, an anachronism rather than the future.

I'm looking to wearables and low-power IoT devices, and for those we may need a new federated identity/discovery scheme. The DNS is practically ancient now, but has served email, web and XMPP and many other protocols besides surprisingly well for decades. I doubt it is sophisticated enough for global-scale wearables and ubiquitous sensors. We could never have built anything so sophisticated on phone numbers.

Most of your remarks seem to align with the preferences of chat app developers. But actually there's no group I'd trust less, today, to determine the future trajectory of communication. Interoperability, federation and end-to-end behaviour is the open architecture of the Internet, and I believe anything that undermines that triad should be met with contempt and resistance.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#276

Post by cm3 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #273
cm3 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes more sense, thanks. Re sharing contacts by replacing User@Domain with numbers: Yes, this solves some of it because everyone agreed to use phone numbers, but phone numbers are a thing of the past and you don't always want to share your phone number just for messaging. Re notification overhead: If you have a system-wide notification display system, then of course the resources it requires are limited but you…

Android notifications do not require any app to be running in order for them to be displayed. lockin still exists because you are the whim of centrally managed for-profit messaging backends Given that 99.99% of people will never run their own servers, this is irrelevant: someone will be managing the infrastructure and those people will be motivated by profit. Welcome to capitalism: it works better than the alternativ…

> Android notifications do not require any app to be running in order for them to be displayed.

I didn't say there has to be. What I said is there's a single notification service which is reused by everyone. If you're saying that there's no daemon of sorts for notifications, then I'm curious where it's implemented.

> Given 99.99% of people will never run their own servers, this is irrelevant

It doesn't matter that someone won't run their own server. What matters is that you can, which means someone you know or trust can and give you access. These days it's much, much easier to run simple services like messaging if you consider the proliferation of remote accessible NAS boxes and such in households. Adding a messaging service to that is easy. Other than that you can use Sandstorm too if you don't want to operate a server.

> Things like WhatsApp or GChat do not simply replace XML with JSON

I'm sorry you thought I said WhatsApp or GChat use JSON. I mentioned it in reference to other messaging services.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#277

Post by thaumasiotes »

smcnally wrote: post #274
thaumasiotes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was AIM, though. That didn't stop the third party clients.

AOL worked actively to stop third-party AIM clients in the same ways as mentioned above from icq through WhatsApp -- changing protocols and central auth mechanisms. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/06/aol.vsms.idg/index... http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/24/business/fi-59086

Right, the point is "whatsapp is hostile to third-party clients" makes no sense as an explanation of why we don't have third-party clients for whatsapp, because all third-party clients for everything have had to deal with hostility from the first party.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#278

Post by dredmorbius »

mike_hearn wrote: post #272
dredmorbius wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phones are dying. Too inconvenient, too much spam, pants vendors, pervasive surveillance, pants call and voice quality, and a phone is too small for a tablet. It's got a few years yet, but POTS and mobile are already legacy, they just don't know it yet.

Phones are dying? Better hope Apple shareholders don't find out!

Apple is in a position to make the transition.

It's not the _devices_, per se. It's the network. The infrastructure. And the ability for Google to rely on a phone number per person. It's an invalid model.

And voice comms are occasionally useful, though I make them rarely -- it could easily be months.

The idea of carrying a bundle of angry that can start sounding at any time, anywhere, is a turn-off. Especially if I've no control of who's at the other end.

Two of the primary reasons people carry phones are because others demand that they be reachable, and secondarily, so that the phone holder can reach others. The second I don't mind as much though it's also a crutch.

A device with good text capabilities, that can also optionally receive voice inputs and convert that to text, allows a very* limited whitelist set of calls, and otherwis directs all incoming traffic to a wait or prove your worth queue, would start to approach reason.

I remember the days of five-line dial phones and office receptionists, pre voicemail. It sucked for the receptionist, but coming back or into the office and being handed a stack of message slips was vastly preferable to bouncing through voicemail and having to do the transcriptions yourself.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#279

Post by Arathorn »

inputmice wrote: post #233
Arathorn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming that matrix needs 5-10 years to be 'usable' seemed to be unnecessarily and unproductively negative, hence my objection to badmouthing when we could instead be working together productively :) The last thing decentralised comms needs is in-fighting. I think the root of the contention here is that you don't seem to understand what Matrix does - this is probably my fault for failing to explain it better to you…

I'm just wondering what makes someone look at an XMPP client like Conversations and say: "This is fundamental flawed let's completely reinvent the wheel. There is no way we can ever get a good UX out of this" Matrix might not be a bad protocol for Instant Messaging. But neither is XMPP. And XMPP already has an established infrastructure of public servers and a fairly large user base which will take Matrix at least 5-…

So from 2012-2013 we maintained a service that ran on XMPP. It wasn't a fun experience. Had Conversations existed back then it might how shown us the light of how to build create a good and modern experience on top of XMPP. Instead, we swapped it out for a proprietary HTTP-based precursor to Matrix (called Glow), which worked astonishingly well for what we needed. So in 2014 we decided to build Matrix with the primary goals of:

1. decentralising the conversation so no single entity owns or controls it: being a federated communication database rather than a messaging platform. 2. making bridging a first class citizen (hence the name Matrix; it's designed to matrix together other conversations) 3. providing a deliberately monolithic spec to try to avoid fragmentation and help us evolve it relatively rapidly.

Now, I have huge respect for you in showing that it's possible to build a good UX on top of XMPP. And we don't think XMPP is fundamentally flawed. But we wanted to try a completely different architecture and design and see if it flies. As per the earlier comment I see it very similar to NNTP and SMTP. They can be both used to power conversations, but architecturally they couldn't be more different, and the world is big enough for both.

Genuine question: any idea how big the public XMPP federation is in terms of active servers and active users? Would be interested to know how Matrix compares.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#280

Post by Arathorn »

jalami wrote: post #111
duskwuff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. And critically: that standard needs to not be XMPP. It's a mess of a protocol that's difficult to implement, and which fails to adequately support many common use cases (e.g, mobile clients, file transfer, and group chats).

I think we should coalesce around a clean modern modular standard that's not XMPP for the perfect world scenario. It's not perfect, but I think you overstate how bad it is. Conversations (a mobile client) allows pictures and (file transfers) and with multi-user-chats MUC (group chats). It takes implementing some XEP's on the client and the server in order for everything to play nice. Implementation is a bear and some…

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, Matrix is seeing quite a lot of adoption as an attempt at a clean modular federated standard (albeit very different in philosophy to XMPP) - there are around 30 clients, lots of bridges, services and bots, and multiple servers in development. There is very much an appetite and interest in open comms still, as the popularity of articles like these attests!
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