The fact that the proprietary protocols haven't been replaced by more open alternatives is largely irrelevant where the end-user is concerned. As long as the protocols have been reverse-engineered to the point where cross-platform tools are possible, it doesn't matter (to the user) whether the underlying protocols are open or closed.
There are now a plethora of instant messenger clients that allow for a single sign on to various instant messaging networks. I think we might see the same in the future for social networks. Facebook and Twitter will be relegated to the role that the various instant message protocols play in a multi-network client.
Moving to closed protocols isn't the whole problem. Everyone used to use AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, which were all* closed protocols. And yet, the developers of gAIM (now Pidgin) and Trillian both developed clients that interoperated with all of these services and others.
Sure, we had five years when everyone was on XMPP. But given that rich history of protocol investigation, what's surprising to me is that progress on support for closed protocols is so much slower now than it was ten, fifteen years ago. Support for Skype, Facebook, Slack, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram -- is poor or limited, and some of these are even open protocols. (Plus, there's still SMS to support, both natively on phones and via services like Pushbullet on the desktop.)
Is there simply no call for unified messaging anymore? Do people enjoy having to use four different messaging apps now? Are the protocols so much harder to figure out? Or are there simply not enough volunteers?
* AOL had two protocols: TOC was mostly open, but the closed OSCAR protocol offered many more features.
> I'm defining closed networks as ones like Facebook Messenger and iMessage and such.
It's odd you put Facebook Messenger in the protocol group that killed off Trillian as it has always supported that. When Facebook Messenger launched it was XMPP compatible and nowadays when it has moved to be fully proprietary it has remained supported through reverse engineering (just like most protocols Trillian supports).
That example aside your further examples of "open protocols" Trillian supported are even less open and more hostile to 3rd party clients than Facebook Messenger:
> The "closed" networks that Trillian accessed still used open protocols. But my progression was AIM, then ICQ at the same time, then Trillian which could do both plus the few people on Yahoo messenger and GTalk and IRC
AIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol, which ironically the "O" stood for "Open" but they never actually distributed a spec/standard and actually went through great effort to prevent other reverse engineered 3rd party clients from being compatible over time. OSCAR had to be reverse engineered no different than (newer) Facebook Messenger or Discord or so on today.
ICQ was where OSCAR was developed (under ownership of AOL). All of the above applies and it intentionally broke unauthorized 3rd party clients many times.
Yahoo Messenger used their proprietary YMSG, had to be reverse engineered, and was often hostilely changed to shake 3rd party clients.
GTalk was better but that's because it was intentionally XMPP compatible. Like I said though "I don't really remember anyone rushing to Trillian because it was the best XMPP client it was because it could speak to multiple closed networks.".
I guess you could throw IRC in as a non XMPP open protocol but, ignoring that these were normally just gatewayed, it doesn't explain either the success or decline of Trillian. All of the supported 3rd party chat clients do.
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Since the internet became consumer towards the end of the 90s there hasn't been a time the majority of people were on open protocol chat networks or a multiprotocol client got popular without support for popular closed protocols of the day. Many clients and bridges have come but they have all eventually run out of steam trying to catch up to the latest hostile changes or the latest proprietary protocol that is taking off while none have ever supported more than the basic feature set like plain text and maybe images across multiple platforms reliably. Not saying it's impossible or people should be using closed protocols just that's how it's been.
To say closed protocols and clients are a new thing that killed the old multiprotocol apps is false, they started to solve exactly that probably but just ran out of steam. Now Matrix has some of us nerdy folks exited about an easy way to glue such networks together via an open federated protocol (which XMPP folks never really liked doing for some reason) and 3rd party integrations are being maintained again. They are still going to run into hostility and lack of feature parity but as we know from the ~2000-~2010 era it can work okay for plain text if you're fine with the occasional missed message or temporary protocol outages from upstream changes.
What if social networking is like instant messaging? After many years, the proprietary instant messaging services have not been replaced with an open alternative. Open does not always win.
Maps: Open: OpenStreetMap. Closed: Google maps, Apple maps
I realise these are mostly not "protocols" (depending on what layer we're talking about). Nevertheless, can hardly say that "Open protocols are already much larger than closed systems".
I may be slightly OT but to me it's kinda sad that the internet is increasingly being built around closed platforms instead of open APIs/protocols. Especially in the IM scene there must be a ton of services incompatible with each other. You need to have a dozen or so of IM programs installed (skype, viber, whatsapp, you name it). Too bad XMPP will probably never see any mainstream adoption. I know it had its share of problems but I believe that it was a step towards the right direction. My hope is with decentralized protocols but still if there isn't some form of standard you will still need a different client for each service. Admittedly opener (anyone can implement a client) but not quite there.
Now I'm only waiting for Google to completely kill XMPP access to Talk/Hangouts. That will be... frustrating.
This has all kind of happened before with MSN, Yahoo, AOl, etc and the corporations have closed it all off again[0].
I'm not holding out hope for the future. I believe it will be all closed protocols and tightly tied to whatever platform owns the protocol.
[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.
Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from?
Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made.
But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps.
I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.
Not only have the client to server protocols been reverse engineered, some proprietary IM services supply libraries for using their proprietary client to server protocols.
When I mentioned IM, I was referring to the fact that service to service communication is closed. With the exception of the XMPP network and some one-off deals between some of the big services, services to not communicate with each other. There is not a single federated instant messaging network.
There is a single federated network for email. I can send a message from my account on Hotmail to Gmail without having an account on Gmail. Imagine what the world would be like if we couldn't do that. We would all have accounts on several services, each with their own inbox. It would suck.
It's telling that email is the last popular, useful protocol. Almost every application (chat, video conferencing, file sharing etc.,) since then have been proprietary and closed wall gardens. It is as if big corporations clearly saw open protocols being a big threat to their monopoly and either didn't bother building apps that adhere to existing protocols or were openly hostile to them.
I think we're talking about different things. I'm not sure if you know we are talking about different things are are doing it intentionally, or if we are just talking past each other.
I can't say for sure what vishnugupta meant, but what I thought when I read their comment are:
* Most people's chat goes over things like Slack or MS Teams -- proprietary protocols. Not the open protocols that do exist like IRC.
* Most people's "instant messaging" goes over things like Signal, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, all proprietary protocols. Even if open protocols like XMPP exist, they are less popular.
* Most people's video conferencing goes over things like Zoom, MS Teams, Apple Facetime -- proprietary protocols.
* I am not familiar with the "file sharing" protocols popular, but I assume the same.
HOWEVER, most people's email goes over open protocols. It's an outlier when it comes to these higher-level interpersonal communications.
(Do you disagree? I'm not sure if you do, or if you're just talking about something else!)
But yes, of course, there are open protocols that are still very much in use. Including things like TCP/IP and UDP (which almost all of the protocols we are talking about function on top of) and HTTP (which some may as well).
I don't think we have ever seen such a reversal, the closest might be Microsoft's attitude towards open source, but that is apples and oranges.
Facebook used to be more open. You could connect to Facebook Messenger using any Jabber/XMPP. They never reversed course, if anything they made it harder to use Messenger without the application.
I think there are practical concerns too that push away from openness and towards silos - it isn't just about money.
Open protocols can be slow to improve because of the very nature of their openness - they have dependencies and need to remain interoperable.
Closed protocols can adapt faster because one entity controls the entire thing. In the case of chat XMPP was in the lead for a while, but the mobile situation was terrible - connections were constantly dropped and even though there were clients that supported multiple accounts (Meebo) it was a pretty bad software experience. The current messaging products are not open, but they are better.
This is a shame I think - because it'd be a lot better if the open products were actually better, not just better because they are open.
Maybe the trick is to hack on a better open protocol, but even then it could similarly be outpaced. Maybe the path to this is defining an open 'social' protocol and fixing the internet identity issue at the same time. Maybe keybase.io can do this?
In reality, the most important thing isn't really the protocol, but how to market it.
We've had open, standard, (some also federated) IM protocols that were on-par with proprietary ones at the time multiple times in the past.
The problem has always been the same: no mainstream adoption, only nerds use it, they stagnate, and a few years later, they're behind what mainstream proprietary apps use.
What we really really need to work on is how to get the general population to adopt these things rather than Facebook's next IM. And that's the really hard part!
So by the time jabber and xmpp came around there were giant existing networks: AIM, ICQ, Messenger. Obviously none of them had any business reason to adopt an open, etc protocol.
Additionally even if they wanted to, actually doing it would likely have been a significant engineering challenge, due to the need to maintain compatibility between client versions.
Agreed. Social companies like Facebook and Twitter started out with open APIs, but closed them as they grew more successful precisely because they don't want to be protocols.
I don't like that, but I get it. The money is in owning the user experience. And it's hard enough to continuously improve your user experience when all the people making that software work for one company. I think one of the reasons email and IRC are losing out to things like Facebook and Slack is that it's nearly impossible to make those things broadly better.
There are now a plethora of instant messenger clients that allow for a single sign on to various instant messaging networks. I think we might see the same in the future for social networks. Facebook and Twitter will be relegated to the role that the various instant message protocols play in a multi-network client.
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