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Counter argument: Standardization and federation comes at a cost. Facebook can build a more cohesive product with interesting features by controlling the ecosys

Counter argument: Standardization and federation comes at a cost. Facebook can build a more cohesive product with interesting features by controlling the ecosystem completely. That's the whole point; they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol. That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special. An example: FB lets you send one-click "likes". It's a great feature; it means "acknowledged". Yet you can't send it with third-party clients, and third-party clients receive it as a URL to an image of a thumbs-up. There's dozens of features like this. How frustrating would it be if Facebook Voice Calls only worked with some people, or someone's client didn't support group messages?

shmerl 11y ago
> Standardization and federation comes at a cost. At a cost that provides long term interopraibility benefits. But these just care about short term rip offs and as well causing interoperability problems for their users (i.e. preventing communication with other services). We must be extremely lucky this didn't stay like that for e-mail. > they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol. That's the point. They measure their gain in how much they can mess up their users (by preventing them from communicating with users of other services). While gain should be measured in how useful such services can become (enhancing, not crippling communication). > That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber It's not federated (which defeats the main purpose). > I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special. If they wanted to improve things and thought that XMPP can't reach that goal, they could propose their non XMPP chat as IETF standard. Same as Google could do with Hangouts and so on.
- gkoberger 11y ago
  Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability. They won't understand the question. They have a FB app on their iPhone and facebook.com on their desktop, and they won't understand what you mean. If they want to message someone "on another service", they'll just use that other service.
  - shmerl 11y ago
    > Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability. Many do complain about it, but can't do much to fix it. People either end up installing 20 different clients to reach those who use other services (imagine installing 20 browsers to read different sites or 20 e-mail clients to use different e-mail accounts), or simply don't communicate with those users when that number grows annoyingly large. This problem affects everyone, and it's pretty apparent even to those who don't visit HN.
    - drumdance 11y ago
      I don't install 20 different clients, and the ones I do install are ones where I want to keep things separate. I don't want Slack messages showing up in my Facebook messages. I don't want Facebook messages showing up in Apple Messages on OSX.
      - matt_kantor 11y ago
        Standard protocols and interoperability do not preclude this. Plenty of people have separate work email addresses from their personal ones.
        shmerl 11y ago
        Indeed. Separation of accounts and profiles isn't really related to artificial separation of existing services which prevents interoperability. Accounts should be separable according to user's preferences, and not according to how services decided not to federate. It's pretty self explanatory.
        nl 11y ago
        And interestingly most people use separate clients for their work and personal email accounts.
    - nl 11y ago
      I've replied up-thread about this, but while it's true that some people complain about it, many also see this as a strength. Plenty of people are quite happy to install 20 IM clients in order to keep different aspects of their life separate. If you doubt this, think back to the numerous HN threads where people complain about how they want to keep the Facebook profile separate to their LinkedIn profile. It's unclear why this is different.
ljk 11y ago
can you send "likes" by typing out "(y)"?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Not the same likes. At some point Facebook added a "like" button in the Messenger, which immediately sends a slightly-different thumbs-up. On Android it replaces the "send message" button when you haven't entered any text yet, and it also features as an action if you expand the new message notification. Both of these make it super-convenient to use it. (Though personally, I don't use it at all; a thumbs-up icon feels disrespectful for me, I prefer to acknowledge by typing out "OK" or even a smiley.)
berdario 11y ago
> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. Facebook planned to shut down that service since 2015/04/30, and in my experience they actually did it around 2015/07/12 I'm puzzled as how you haven't realized it... I guess that the xmpp endpoint might still be working for some users? https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat Approaching that event, I warned friends to stop contacting me on Facebook, since I would stop checking its messages. (all of my email/phone/chat contacts are available in my about page, so it wouldn't be difficult for people to adapt) The problem is that there's no way to disable the chat, so people wouldn't mistakenly use it to contact me. And since I still use the facebook web page somewhat regularly, I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of using actively another walled chat protocol. My kludgy solution was to go and "mute" every single conversation I had in the last year. It basically never happens that new people write me on Facebook, and this way I can still check the messages once in a while, but de-facto I'm not actively using their chat service anymore, thus hopefully not contributing to the network effect.

shmerl 11y ago

> Standardization and federation comes at a cost. At a cost that provides long term interopraibility benefits. But these just care about short term rip offs and as well causing interoperability problems for their users (i.e. preventing communication with other services). We must be extremely lucky this didn't stay like that for e-mail. > they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol. That's the point. They measure their gain in how much they can mess up their users (by preventing them from communicating with users of other services). While gain should be measured in how useful such services can become (enhancing, not crippling communication). > That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber It's not federated (which defeats the main purpose). > I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special. If they wanted to improve things and thought that XMPP can't reach that goal, they could propose their non XMPP chat as IETF standard. Same as Google could do with Hangouts and so on.

gkoberger 11y ago
Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability. They won't understand the question. They have a FB app on their iPhone and facebook.com on their desktop, and they won't understand what you mean. If they want to message someone "on another service", they'll just use that other service.
- shmerl 11y ago
  > Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability. Many do complain about it, but can't do much to fix it. People either end up installing 20 different clients to reach those who use other services (imagine installing 20 browsers to read different sites or 20 e-mail clients to use different e-mail accounts), or simply don't communicate with those users when that number grows annoyingly large. This problem affects everyone, and it's pretty apparent even to those who don't visit HN.
  - drumdance 11y ago
    I don't install 20 different clients, and the ones I do install are ones where I want to keep things separate. I don't want Slack messages showing up in my Facebook messages. I don't want Facebook messages showing up in Apple Messages on OSX.
    - matt_kantor 11y ago
      Standard protocols and interoperability do not preclude this. Plenty of people have separate work email addresses from their personal ones.
      - shmerl 11y ago
        Indeed. Separation of accounts and profiles isn't really related to artificial separation of existing services which prevents interoperability. Accounts should be separable according to user's preferences, and not according to how services decided not to federate. It's pretty self explanatory.
      - nl 11y ago
        And interestingly most people use separate clients for their work and personal email accounts.
  - nl 11y ago
    I've replied up-thread about this, but while it's true that some people complain about it, many also see this as a strength. Plenty of people are quite happy to install 20 IM clients in order to keep different aspects of their life separate. If you doubt this, think back to the numerous HN threads where people complain about how they want to keep the Facebook profile separate to their LinkedIn profile. It's unclear why this is different.

ljk 11y ago

can you send "likes" by typing out "(y)"?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Not the same likes. At some point Facebook added a "like" button in the Messenger, which immediately sends a slightly-different thumbs-up. On Android it replaces the "send message" button when you haven't entered any text yet, and it also features as an action if you expand the new message notification. Both of these make it super-convenient to use it. (Though personally, I don't use it at all; a thumbs-up icon feels disrespectful for me, I prefer to acknowledge by typing out "OK" or even a smiley.)

berdario 11y ago

> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. Facebook planned to shut down that service since 2015/04/30, and in my experience they actually did it around 2015/07/12 I'm puzzled as how you haven't realized it... I guess that the xmpp endpoint might still be working for some users? https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat Approaching that event, I warned friends to stop contacting me on Facebook, since I would stop checking its messages. (all of my email/phone/chat contacts are available in my about page, so it wouldn't be difficult for people to adapt) The problem is that there's no way to disable the chat, so people wouldn't mistakenly use it to contact me. And since I still use the facebook web page somewhat regularly, I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of using actively another walled chat protocol. My kludgy solution was to go and "mute" every single conversation I had in the last year. It basically never happens that new people write me on Facebook, and this way I can still check the messages once in a while, but de-facto I'm not actively using their chat service anymore, thus hopefully not contributing to the network effect.