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Message from Facebook: this could be war

espresso.economist.com

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Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#41

Post by upofadown »

lmm wrote: post #30
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time). I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends…

What is wrong with jabber group chat?

You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#42

Post by blowski »

Morgawr wrote: post #36
antihero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in…

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, th…

Everyone has an email address. I know only three or four people who have even used IRC since 2000, typically for developers on open source product chat rooms like Drupal.

Whatever the pros and cons of the technology, or the whys and wherefores of the reason for this lack of widespread use, it clearly has not been adopted by the mainstream. If the goal of a protocol is to be used widely, then clearly IRC has failed.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#43

Post by ForHackernews »

userbinator wrote: post #19
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

IRC? I think that would be the closest analogue to email. Open standard, many implementations.

XMPP (Jabber) is probably a more direct analogy. But the idea is similar. Unfortunately most of the big providers (Google, Facebook, etc) are disabling XMPP federation for their chat services, even if they still use the protocol internally.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#44

Post by venomsnake »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Reclassify mesasging provider as title II telecoms and force interoperability. Problem solved :) All of our technology software giants could use some Standard Oil/Bell labbing anyway.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#45

Post by wiremine »

As developers we value open apis and interop, but I'm not sure end-users care that much. They just want to connect with their friends and family, and if they need to use a different apps to stay connected, so be it.

In a way, I think the device and notification systems are enough for most people. If I have 5 different message apps, they are all on my phone and they all notify me when something comes in, so I'm able to stay connected.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#46

Post by benihana »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Damn you're right. All we have to do is standardize an open source chat protocol. It's so simple! Why haven't we done this before? Clearly because you weren't around to point out it should be done. And not because it takes an incredible amount of influence and work to get a bunch of nerds to agree to something as simple as the name of a color, much less how a chat protocol should work. And not because it's much easier for a company that has a platform to do it since they don't have to appease every person on the standard body's whim. Nope. It was cause we didn't realize we needed one.

But hey, thank god you're here to be super helpful and point out that we don't have a good chat protocol, but we should darn it. So someone (not you obviously - you have things to do I'm sure) go get it done and report back after you've made a good open source chat protocol.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#47

Post by NoGravitas »

lmm wrote: post #38
NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

XMPP is literally worse than AIM (AIM is actually quite good these days, shame nobody uses it). Its groupchat support is simply awful, and if you log in from multiple devices (which was common enough years ago and is ubiquitous now that people have mobile phones) then messages will go to one at random and you will never have consistent chat history. These shouldn't be hard problems given that just about every other c…

I wouldn't call decentralization a hair-shirt. I mean, I take your point; it makes certain things more difficult to implement. But it's a tradeoff, not a pointless sacrifice. There are huge advantages. The most obvious one to me is "keep your personal identifier when you change providers". Just like email.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#48

Post by unfamiliar »

panamafrank wrote: post #11

Is this "espresso" format the future for the economist? There should be a link to the full article at least, I read this rag purely for the analysis and this format is a bit short on that. here it is in full: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21646802...

Espresso is breaking snippets that come out every day. I see it is as stuff that hasn't been written up for the weekly yet.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#49

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

lmm wrote: post #30
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time). I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends…

Arguably people are still trying to "fix" jabber. For example XEP-0280: Message Carbons should help with multiple clients and XEP-0313: Message Archive Management (trunk Prosody, released Gajim, patches for Pidgin) finally bring an archive of messages synchronized between clients. Other extensions like XEP-0138, XEP-0198 or XEP-0237 would help mobile clients (e.g. Conversations for Android).

My only gripe is what took so bloody long. Google Talk debuted 10 years ago and IIRC had an online unified message archive (in gmail) for as long as I remember (2007?). It took 8 years to replicate that feature? "Good enough" ethics at work indeed.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#50

Post by stingraycharles »

Morgawr wrote: post #36
antihero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in…

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, th…

I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.
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