Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 295 posts

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

#281

Post by wcummings »

nroets wrote: post #152
insane_dreamer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Google failed to realize is that people want chat that's connected to other services they frequently use. I'm already browsing FB so it's easy to chat with my FB friends using Messenger rather than both pop over to another service. The same reason why MSFT has tried (much less successfully) to incorporate its chat offerings into Office365 and the reason it bought Skype. Google was in a position to capture the ch…

Great theory. Except that outside the US people who are FB friends tell each other "I want to chat, give me your number so I can add you on WhatsApp". Outside the US, WhatsApp is winning because of network effects.

I love WhatsApp, but I can't imagine handing out my phone # the way I hand out my email or irc nickname.

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

#282

Post by jalami »

Arathorn wrote: post #280
jalami wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Matrix is interesting. I like where they're going and once their encryption-layer gets out of beta, I'll take a harder look.

Right now there seems to be a significant Axolotl/PEP/ratchet/OMEMO/olm schism[0] that I hope doesn't fracture decentralized IM any more than it is. App-store DRM v. Copy-left purism (not being derogatory) seem to be at the root. At least multiple parties are trying to work together here instead of forging ahead alone. I'm hopeful.

[0] https://github.com/anurodhp/Monal/issues/9#issuecomment-2080...

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

#283

Post by Arathorn »

jalami wrote: post #282
Arathorn wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Matrix is interesting. I like where they're going and once their encryption-layer gets out of beta, I'll take a harder look. Right now there seems to be a significant Axolotl/PEP/ratchet/OMEMO/olm schism[0] that I hope doesn't fracture decentralized IM any more than it is. App-store DRM v. Copy-left purism (not being derogatory) seem to be at the root. At least multiple parties are trying to work together here instea…

The point of Olm as an independent Apache-licensed double ratchet is absolutely not to fragment E2E, but just provide an alternative clean-room implementation for those who want it (and to be one that we can easily audit and build on for Matrix). We will do everything we can to ensure that Olm directly interops with whatever the OMEMO team ends up doing. Given Olm is written to be compatible with TextSecure this shouldn't be an issue.

Just to be clear: mismatched E2E is obviously the mortal enemy of interoperability. Which is why it's really exciting that so many systems are using Axolotl derivatives, and it's absolutely critical to ensure they can interwork.

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

#284

Post by StavrosK »

Freak_NL wrote: post #186
StavrosK wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenID Connect supports discoverability, which enables a protocol like Mozilla Persona to work over it. That's exactly what some others and I are working on, hopefully we will make some headway and greatly increase the usability of authentication again.

Sounds like a good initiative, be sure to post on HN when you reach significant milestones. What I worry about with OpenID Connect on the open internet (as opposed to OpenID Connect used in a corporate setting, or to provide single sign-on solutions for specific partnered services) is how it almost always results in a service asking you to use Google or Facebook to authenticate, with huge coloured buttons, followed b…

I think it is, because the "Google" or "Facebook" part isn't static in OpenID Connect, they're just popular defaults. OIDC doesn't care where it goes to authenticate, you can just as well enter your email, foo@example.com and the server will try discovery and authentication against example.com (which can then be running your own OIDC provider).

What we're working on (we will definitely post about it) is basically OIDC with a nicer UX, where the user enters their email, the domain is parsed out, discovery (of OIDC or whatever other protocol) is done, and the user is redirected to either their provider, if found, or to a default method of authentication (currently a link sent over email) to log in.

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

#285

Post by untog »

Bromskloss wrote: post #246
Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

Haha! I just tried Vector on iOS and apparently moved about in such a way that I accidentally triggered the greatest notification message: > You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?

This is so, so dumb. Who actually shakes their phone in anger? Very few people. How many people accidentally trigger things like this in the course of everyday usage? Everyone.

Google Maps has the same thing and it just strikes me as some cutesy feature a developer thought would be funny, but is actually very annoying.

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

#286

Post by bad_user »

mkhpalm wrote: post #268
bad_user wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to use Gaim/Pidgin doesn't count as interoperability dude. Those protocols worked only because somebody bothered to reverse engineer them and this "interoperability" only worked half the time. I know because I was using Gaim/Pidgin for Yahoo! Messenger back then. Today at least they are using web technologies and I get to use Facebook's Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts and Slack on Linux without headaches.

For a short period, most of those old proprietary clients started supporting XMPP. That was the golden age of instant messaging. I couldn't help but notice that somewhere around that time is also when Apple released iMessage and FaceTime. Suddenly, everybody ran back to walled gardens and we de-evolved to a point where people are suddenly okay paying for a service that they can only sort of integrate with. Thats how…

Oh, I totally get what you're saying, except that I don't find usage of XMPP clients to be that useful. Yes, I know that Facebook supported at some point XMPP clients. I never cared about it.

Real interoperability is federation. If we had federation, the problem of using your favorite client would be moot. My argument is that there never was a "golden age" of chat, unless you refer to IRC back in the nineties and even that would be debatable.

And out of the big boys I can only name Google's Talk as supporting federation, only to be killed and replaced by Hangouts, that doesn't support federation because, wouldn't you know, they needed to innovate and couldn't do that while supporting XMPP, allegedly. And even if Hangouts pushed WebRTC forward, I'm glad it's not used and I'm glad that it suffers a slow death, because this proves that the innovation argument is bullshit. And I'm fairly certain that Google Talk was more popular than Hangouts, even if Hangouts got pushed down the throats of every Android user.

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

#287

Post by ronnier »

MildlySerious wrote: post #260
ronnier wrote: post #16

To this day, ICQ is still the best messenger I've used.

May I ask what made it the best messenger for you? I hated every second I spent on ICQ. The ad-infested client, the fact that if someone else thought 24px purple comic-sans was their identity, I would have to deal with it.. The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an Emoji it was converted back to its text version.

I mean pre-ad days.

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

#288

Post by drewm1980 »

StephenConnell wrote: post #269
matthewmacleod wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this UI in other apps, and I absolutely fucking hate it. Google Maps was a particularly egregious offender, where rotating the device or calibrating the compass would prompt for feedback, usually in the middle of trying to use a map. And who shakes a device in annoyance anyway?!

No kidding. Especially annoying when using Google Maps and driving a stick shift.

The stick shift gesture should notify the police of your location and destination.

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

#289

Post by drewm1980 »

untog wrote: post #285
Bromskloss wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha! I just tried Vector on iOS and apparently moved about in such a way that I accidentally triggered the greatest notification message: > You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?

This is so, so dumb. Who actually shakes their phone in anger? Very few people. How many people accidentally trigger things like this in the course of everyday usage? Everyone. Google Maps has the same thing and it just strikes me as some cutesy feature a developer thought would be funny, but is actually very annoying.

Having an app developer available to be shaken in anger was deemed impractical.

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

#290

Post by johntash »

Arathorn wrote: post #145
Perceptes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that bridges are implemented via application services (the Matrix term for privileged plugins that extend the capability of the server,) so a user's ability to communicate over non-Matrix protocols is dependent on the homeserver where their user account is based. The best known example of this is that the public matrix.org homeserver is bridged to the Freenode IRC network, and certain channels are…

It generally doesn't require input from the target network being bridged, unless you're running a large public bridge like the ones we host on matrix.org. You do however currently have to run your own homeserver in order to run your own bridge (although in future we're looking at ways of getting around this for 'personal' bridging purposes). If you run your own homeserver, and your own bridge to Rhizome/wherever, you…

> If you run your own homeserver, and your own bridge to Rhizome/wherever, you can think of the end result being a bit like bitlbee or a pidgin-in-the-cloud... but decentralised

Wouldn't this still be centralized to your home server?

Post reply on HN