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

Message from Facebook: this could be war

espresso.economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#51

Post by antihero »

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…

Ok, so there's a difference between failing as an underlying technology, and failing as an actual thing people use.

Herein lies the difference between e-mail and IRC - e-mail is fundamentally the same as an underlying technology (we still use IMAP!), but as an end-user product has changed a huge amount over the last twenty years. Things like webmail have progressed a huge amount, and systems like Outlook/Exchange have been built that allow it to be managed in a business centric manner.

With modern e-mail, you sign up for an e-mail, and that's it. You can now go to a website and e-mail people.

With IRC as a product, (aside from the ugly webchats that still expose huge streams of text and NickServ and other things), the end-user experience is still fundamentally the same.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#52

Post by userbinator »

antihero wrote: post #24
Morgawr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late? This is why I simply love IRC.

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…

I think the one big distinction between IRC and email which made the latter gain massive popularity is that theoretically (i.e. spam-prevention and other blocking notwithstanding), any email you send from one address' provider/domain can reach any other email address. This means people can publish an email address and anyone else is able to easily contact them. The server that gets mailed is even specified in the DNS system - MX records. With IRC, you basically have to be on the same network to chat, and there's no way to publish an "IRC server address" in the DNS.

I have a feeling that if DNS had this capability, and "IRC addresses" became standardised in the same way as emails (e.g. nick!irc.example.com), allowing anyone to use it with the same universality as email, the story might be very different today.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#53

Post by tomp »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #12
tomp wrote: post #6

In the UK, there have been quite a few TV ads from Facebook recently. Yesterday, after watching another one, my girlfriend commented: "Even Facebook is making ads now - this tells us a lot about how well things are going for them."

Heh, good point. Google advertises on Google but I have hardly seen a Google ad outside of a page that displays Google ads. Disclaimer: I don't watch TV.

I think advertising makes more sense for Google - they have a number of products, and are always releasing new ones, so advertising is as much branding as it is informing.

For Facebook, however, it's just branding - everybody knows what Facebook does (and the ads are just that - "keep friends").

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#54

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

Thanks for the link to matrix.org. I hadn't heard of it, and I wish them success. I don't think XMPP is awful, and I think the reasons for its failure have been political/social/cultural rather than technical, but if Matrix can get more traction, then more power to them.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#55

Post by xtrumanx »

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…

Instant messaging was useful to non-tech users since the days before web 2.0. Don't you remember AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger?

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#56

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will?

For the same reason as there is a war for your money by big companies. This is how capitalism works. Except with data, it's worse: because people will use free services in preference to paid services, and because network effects are so strong (you can't be the only person you know using your chat service), services have to be "free" and extract value in other, exploitative ways.

Someone has to do the organisation and make it work. IRC makes the users do more of that work. This is true of open systems in general. Proprietary systems end up more convenient but with underhanded ways of paying for it: selling your data, intrusive advertising, etc.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#57

Post by icebraining »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
w8rbt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And email is under constant attack. Especially corporate/business email, but personal accounts are now targets as well. Basically anyone with a bank/ebay/paypal account is a target if they have an email address. Spam, malware and phishing are huge problems with email. I doubt it will exist forever in its current form. I expect more and more restrictions (on sending and receiving) and more and more walled gardens as c…

This is indeed why people retreat to the safety of "platforms". It's Bruce Schneier's "feudalism" argument: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht... IMO the theoretically best way out of this is the user-owned cooperative, but there's very little traction for that.

Meh, I don't trust a large "user-owned cooperative" much more than I trust Google. Then incentives of the owners may be more aligned, but the incentives of the people who actually run it aren't. For an example, see the collapse of the Spanish banking system, much of which was composed of mutual banks.

I'd trust a small cooperative, but then you still have the problem of federating between those, which brings you back to square one.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#58

Post by aji »

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…

While IRC is certainly in use at companies and by the public, it's in a pretty steep decline, especially in the last decade and a half. The only people who avidly use it in their free time anymore tend to be tinkerers and tech types. (As a side effect of this, the only large network that hasn't been shrinking significantly is Freenode.) From the public point of view, IRC is something for CSI-type movies to name drop when they want to evoke hacker culture, which is not by itself a bad thing, but it's a strong indicator of a perception problem.

As someone who has spent a non-trivial amount of time in IRC development and as an operator on small and medium sized networks, I've noticed that IRC (especially when services are involved) is pretty counter-intuitive for many users, even otherwise brilliant ones. Modes are obtuse and vary wildly from server to server, the idea of a separate nickname and channel registrations seems unnecessarily complex, channels just disappear when everybody leaves them, and so on. On top of this, the IRC architecture is needlessly limited for the most common IRC network use cases these days. In the past where networks were a federation of autonomous servers, it made sense, but these days a network's servers are partly or entirely controlled by a single entity, and things like netsplits are an unnecessary interruption in user service.

There is a working group to define the next generation of the IRC standard, but the additions tend to be patches for small nigglings in the protocol (such as needing to consistently poll for user away statuses and account names) than aggressive overhauls to the whole architecture, which is okay; there's only so much you can do with an effort like that while still seeing progress, and these are things IRC has needed for a long time anyway.

In my opinion what is needed if IRC is to regain its popularity is an innovative new server implementation that challenges the very workings of IRC from the ground up, maintaining only enough of the protocol to interact with existing clients. If users are to feel comfortable with IRC, they need a server software suite that conforms to their expectations of how a chat service should behave, and no solution currently provides that. The problem is, there is an enormous engineering cost associated with this, and the IRC development community is having a hard enough time as it is finding people who are willing to do more than just basic maintenance tasks.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#59

Post by aikah »

This is the kind of market where UI/UX is the single most important thing in the app. I personally began using MSN messenger 10 years ago , and moved to skype because I felt skype was easier to use, had a better UI . It was simply beautiful compared to MSN messenger. On the other hand, the skype client on my android is just shitty as hell, it might have changed since but I understand why skype doesn't dominate the mobile space.

I tried a lot of "raw" XMPP clients, most of them felt like the developer was in charge of the UI/UX. It felt like shit.

If an open standard wants to win, it has to have a very good client,with a perfect UX/UI.

I understand it's a bit difficult for designers that aren't developers to contribute to opensource code projects. I'm thinking very hard about how such a tool could be set up,and how can the design workflow and the coding workflow could be joined seamlessly. I'll come up with something eventually.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#60

Post by golergka »

sspiff wrote: post #31
golergka wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because open-source chat platforms lack features that make apps like WhatsApp good for regular users. How long does it take you to set up a Jabber client? Can you add a person to Jabber using just their phone number?

It depends on the client. TextSecure is an open-source XMPP/Jabber client for Android which does end-to-end encryption (OTR?), and adds contacts based on your address book automatically. It also supports adding a new contact by phone number, and replaces the stock text messaging application, automatically upgrading text messages to OTR XMPP sessions if the other party is on the same network. It doesn't do federation…

No iOS version.
Post reply on HN