Ok, I just read the facts they list and state and I come away with a very different perspective. XMPP for all but the most advanced end users is dead at google. If they are using the protocol internally matters little if the user experience and federation is broken.
Oh, I think we can agree that the situation is far from ideal. But this is to note that nothing has actually changed recently, as opposed to what has been written last week. With the exception of Voice over the old GTalk network, that is. And, of course, to highlight again that Google had the best way to describe why it is important to have choice, and then removed that choice.
> Google was in a position to change all that when they adopted XMPP for Google Talk.
I'd add to that that if they considered XMPP inferior for whatever reason, they were in position to change it by opening up Hangouts like XMPP-next or whatever. They simply betrayed the whole effort.
Not a techie, but as I understand it, group Hangouts aren't compatible with XMPP. Pidgin works solely for one-on-one chats.
I actually like Hangouts in theory (GVoice/Skype/GChat in one!), but it's a bloated monster of an extension that absolutely should not run in-browser. Even on my relatively powerful computer, I disabled Hangouts in Gmail just to function. I don't understand why Google can't build something as lightweight and beautiful as Pidgin.
All other critiques aside, it's telling that any users are coming to this conclusion because for me, a huge part of moving to GTalk/Hangouts back in 2006 or so was that I didn't need to install another IM app. I typically kept/keep Gmail open in a tab whenever I'm at my computer and it was great to not worry about Trillian or ICQ or AIM or any of those. When I was working at low-level jobs right out of college it wasn't always permitted or feasible to install applications like that on shared computers anyway. In-browser chat was a godsend and I liked how I could add my AIM account back when that seemed to be one of the more popular IM options among my non-techie friends.
Honestly I think Gmail/GTalk owe a lot to AOL for allowing that interoperability. Sites like Facebook would never allow you to connect with Google+ and use a competitor's site to access their platform. It takes away their biggest advantages (critical mass and inertia).
But it's right after lunch and I'm getting off topic. Personally I still use Hangouts as my primary IM/chat platform because it doesn't seem to give my systems much of a performance hit and it lets me carry conversations between machines and my phone without having to install apps all over. I use Pidgin at work but for everything else, Hangouts is still my default. Doesn't mean I'd mind performance improvements though.
I do most of my development on Ubuntu but I still have all my productivity apps on Windows, and on that platform Hangouts' interface is just horrible. I keep hoping they will release something better, but the desktop is not where their energy is being expended these days. At least if they used XMPP third-party devs for whom the desktop remains relevant could create better clients. As it is now you either live with Hangouts or move off the platform entirely. Sort of odd and depressing to have ended up here, imo.
Only works if have got a Gmail account. I had been using Gtalk with a Google account custom domain and that's gone. Took me a lot of time to realize my SVR records were not the problem. I created a new account with Gmail and everything works fine.
Is it an old account from before Google Hangouts? Mine was a new one after that. I think I really understood what should be done but perhaps I missed a step. In any case, creating a Gmail account "fixed" it.
> However, since the Google Talk Service does not support server-to-server encryption via TLS (something that was required by RFC 3920 in 2004), a number of servers (including jabber.org) refuse to establish a connection since May 2014.
Yeah, that's the deadly deal breaker. Practically all servers make it mandatory now. Since Google blatantly refuse to support server to server encryption (I wonder why), all my contacts that use Google Talk are basically cut off. Goodbye Google, you became evil as soon as you decided not to open Hangouts protocol for everyone and broke XMPP federation for Google Talk.
Server to server encryption problem was reported to Google multiple times, but they used their usual stonewalling response to address it.
Everyone wants to take XMPP, but no one wants to give XMPP. The old Microsoft model of embrace and extend. What could stop this sort of behavior?
Could standards be constructed in a way the punishes greedy 'compliance' while still providing enough benefit to keep implementations from simply ignoring standards all together?
IMHO this should be a case for regulation (although you'll probably disagree, with that username :-). Basically, if you run a service with more than, say, a million users, you should be required (or strongly incentivized) to provide federation to your competitors.
So as a user you'd be able to connect from GTalk/Hangouts to Skype or Facebook chat. Going further, as a Facebook account owner you could follow people on twitter, and post to friends' walls if they use diaspora.
I guess this would break many "Silo" business models (after all, that's the purpose of such a regulation). But it would be good for competition, it would give smaller competitors a chance. And it would give the large players a strong incentive to be great "account providers". I wouldn't use Facebook (G+, Google Talk, ...) just because all my friends are there, but maybe because of their great privacy policy :-D or because they offer the best UI or some innovative features.
No, it's the job of the users to use open standards. I try to use XMPP still and encourage people to use with me. They're probably using Pidgin or a similar multi-protocol chat software anyway SINCE EVERY CHAT PROTOCOL IS A WALLED GARDEN.
This is a terrible, inaccurate article to link. Google Talk is going away, so is irrelevant. Google has a big banner on pages about it that it is going away. I don't even understand why the article talks about it so much and mentions it can still be used inter-server without SSL. That's just silly and clouding the issue. Google Talk is irrelevant to anyone now.
Google Hangouts will only show Google+ people as someone you can message. Period. There are some vague little interop features left. You can login direct to Google servers and chat with a third party client, yes.
Google has officially said they will no longer support federation - so other companies Jabber servers and user accounts will not work with Hangout users. So of the two huge user side things everyone is talking about: choose non-Google clients and login directly to Google still has some support, choose non-Google account is going the way of the dodo very much so.
The article, I guess, only really cares about XMPP like caring about "do developers still use Java". The point it makes isn't really the end user sort of thing people are talking about. Google could still use XMPP internally and the article would be screaming yes, but it could be irrelevant to users if there's no interop anyway.
> This is a terrible, inaccurate article to link. Google Talk is going away, so is irrelevant.
It's a valid article to link. Google Talk (federated based on open standards) is not going away - it's already gone (at least federation part). Hangouts is a closed non interoperable service, not based on open standards. Clear degradation for Google. However this article isn't saying anything new. Google degraded to that a while ago and I doubt there is any point in trying to convince them otherwise. They chose their degrading direction with a lame excuse from Eric Schmidt which sounded like "everyone else does it".
> Google Talk is irrelevant to anyone now.
That's bunk. I had many contacts (more than a half actually) who are Google users and with whom I could communicate before. When server to server encryption became mandatory on most XMPP servers, those contacts were simply cut off. Gone. And don't say it's irrelevant - it would be a royal pain asking all those people to register on another XMPP server, and I'm not interested in using Google one. So I simply had to stop communicating with them over IM. Do I need to say what I think about Google regarding it?
> When server to server encryption became mandatory on most XMPP servers, those contacts were simply cut off. Gone.
Same situation here. Would love to keep using the DDG XMPP servers for all IM. Sadly only 2 (two) contacts remain since the TLS clampdown last year. The account is still enabled in Pidgin/Finch (in tmux on rpi), hoping for some reversal in XMPP's fortunes!
Feel free to add me as a contact there: [this username]@dukgo.com
An open message platform is a great idea but individuals don't care. They are happy with walled gardens and XMPP doesn't have a USP to convince them otherwise.
Sometimes you just have to admit defeat and move on.
I think users do care about things like being able to use different apps with the same messaging service; non-techie friends of mine complain all the time about how some service X has a great mobile app but a bad web app and how service Y is the exact opposite. The problem with XMPP was it never really seemed to spawn the cool apps that would get the attention of non-techies (for whatever reason, but the fact you couldn't talk it natively from the browser can't have helped).
(Then again, I'm not exactly unbiased given I work for http://matrix.org)
XMPP, as a standard, was too slow to adopt mobile, so the cool apps had to invent their own messaging protocol (perhaps on top of XMPP) to get push notifications and such.
I can't understand this argument. There was not much extra stuff needed for mobile and most of the specs for it were written long ago. I suspect more people liked reinventing this easy-seeming wheel rather than XMPP was not ready.
I'm running Xabber on my phone and I refuse to use WhatsApp. Why would I pay for something when Xabber is free? WhatsApp is also a pain to install and verify your number if you don't have texting.
All they had to do is release their protocol specification, kind of like they did with SPDY.
It's quite obvious that when they started they were small compared to AIM, MSN, YIM and others so they used XMPP to help gain traction, once they became huge they dropped interoperability to lock users inside.
Oh yes it's early days for Matrix still. We do have clients for web, android and ios which we use day to day; they're nothing too fancy at the moment, but they're slowly getting better.
Matrix is very much still in beta; people have been quite excited about writing their own server implementations but have decided to wait until the protocol (and documentation!) stabilize. :)
Nothing. Google Talk is an entirely separate service from Google Voice.
That being said, I wouldn't count on Google Voice continuing to exist long-term. It's not positioned as a major product on their site -- you have to click through to their complete product list [1] to even see it mentioned -- and it hasn't seen any major changes in a while now.
I've been having increasing problems even having messages properly make it through between XMPP and Hangouts clients lately. Sometimes I have to open up hangouts on my phone so my gtalk messages actually go through to another user.
So I'm not sure it's clear that even the days of that interop aren't numbered as well.
The pain of all this would much greatly lessened if they would make a decent non-browser-based desktop client, or at least open up their server-side conversation history API to third party client development.
Google Talk is a great, lightweight client that I've used for many, many years. Google Hangouts is an obnoxious pain-in-the-ass that I stopped using after a couple of days.
I just want something lightweight and not dependent on my browser. I use Chrome, but Hangouts just gets in the way. Google Talk does not.
Agreed... I just had a discussion with a coworker that recently switched over to Hangouts from GoogleTalk. They came across weird/odd/non-standard behavior whereby the chat windows "float" above everything, even after losing focus. You have to actively "minimize" them in order for them to go away.
Got the same one, with Windows, after I logged in with an old Blackberry OS7 client. So they don't even check the operation system, the just assume windows users.
Actually, the issue is that Hangouts doesn't work with federated XMPP. This means I can't talk to my @gmail.com friends from my own XMPP server. This is a problem, which significantly breaks things.
So gone are the days of being able to have one IM client for all of the different protocols. It's going to be on the desktop the same as it is on the phone, and we're all going to be running 4-5 different IM clients with all the same features just to be able to talk to everyone.
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