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Here's a timeline we put together of about 60 incompatible chat services: https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf O

by rekoros 11y ago

Here's a timeline we put together of about 60 incompatible chat services: https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf Our service Sameroom (https://sameroom.io https://sameroom.io) is a commercial solution to the chat incompatibility disaster, not too different from an AC adapter thingy with a bunch of different plugs, one or two per continent. After implementing the protocols of quite a number of these systems (~20), we're seeing a scary acceleration toward further incompatibility. It's good for our business, but really pretty bad for the world.

Apocryphon 11y ago
As it turns out, the tower of Babel is completely self-perpetuating.
brazeon 11y ago
Do you plan on open sourcing plugs or any parts of your system?
- rekoros 11y ago
  You can see what happens to OS projects that work with WhatsApp, Skype, and some of the other heavily guarded walled gardens -- cease & desist orders, carried out by GitHub. We have absolutely no interest in joining that list, which unfortunately means the answer - for the time being - is no :(
  - cyphar 11y ago
    Right, but surely if you're selling it that's much more incentive for a cease and a desist (regardless of whether it is free software).
    - rekoros 11y ago
      Actually I don't think so. The main thing the owners of big networks are afraid of is spam. We provide a ridiculously expensive way to connect, say, Slack to Skype, which is ==great for Skype==, from almost every possible angle. It means Skype users can stay on Skype instead of switching to someone else's Slack team.
      - taurath 11y ago
        In that case great for skype, bad for slack. Someone, somewhere will decide they'd rather force those customers to use their service/client, or else they'd have an open protocol in the first place.
        rekoros 11y ago
        There's a huge compliance problem with working in someone else's Slack team -- you own none of the resulting data and you don't control access on your end. Email is much better in this way, since everyone gets a copy. With Sameroom you essentially retain the carbon copy semantics of email, but with real-time collaboration. So, I'd argue that it's great for Slack.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
scrollaway 11y ago
Thank you, that PDF is incredibly depressing. By the way, well done on sameroom. I came across your product while working on the stuff I mentioned and it looks like an incredibly useful thing. I really wish you would open source it, though. (Or at least open source some libraries for talking to the protocols you deal with. Especially Hangouts.)
- rekoros 11y ago
  Thank you! We're so paranoid about getting shut down by Google (Hangouts, no API), Microsoft (Skype, no API), and Facebook (Messenger, no API) that we're not only not open sourcing any of our implementations, we're not even providing a commercial API in fear of having to deal with some form of abuse. That said, the night is young. We hope to eventually gain enough leverage to get the big guys to listen to us.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Ok. It's kind of good to hear the barrier to open sourcing is more legal than commercial. That means it's fixable :) Can I ask you some details on how you went about working with Skype and Hangouts? Did you do the reverse engineering yourself? These are protocols several popular open source projects have been trying to support for years and haven't succeeded. Can I also ask you about your tech stack/languages you used for Sameroom?
    - rekoros 11y ago
      We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work. Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time. The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-open-source-developer-for-a-year-4438568a1cfd#.xnljstik2 https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...). Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
andrey_utkin 11y ago
Out of curiosity: are you leveraging such software as spectrum (spectrum.im) and libpurple? These pieces seem to be a good fit for internal gears of your product. Good luck, you are working on an important problem.
- rekoros 11y ago
  Hi Andrey - we're not using spectrum.im or libpurple (but are aware of both). We saw that libpurple now supports Telegram, so we may borrow some ideas from them :) Thank you!
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    Please look at Telepathy too.
peteretep 11y ago
It doesn't look like you provide quite what I'm after, which is a single OS X / iOS app that seamlessly connects to all of those, while supporting the differentiating features of each. Would easily shell out $30 for such a thing, and maybe even $10 a month for a licensed version. Setting up "tunnels" between client installs probably gets me fired.
- rekoros 11y ago
  We focus on connecting teams vs individual productivity. Check out http://meetfranz.com/ http://meetfranz.com/ for a single app option. About getting fired - not if we sell our solution to your IT :) They might like it, actually, since they can a) provide something useful to their user base and b) get a better handle on the chat situation.
donatj 11y ago
The timeline is missing the fact that ICQ converted to Oscar after the AOL acquisition and users on both networks can talk.
- rekoros 11y ago
  Thanks - will fix.
  - alexvoda 11y ago
    Would you mind releasing the source (SVG? Illustaror?) of that very depressing chart under an freedom respecting licence (CC-BY? CC-BY-SA?) and hosting it on something like Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab/Codeplex? I would like to contribute by updating it. Also, I would like to link to it on Wikipedia.
takeda 11y ago
This is so disappointing. Especially Jabber/XMPP was created to fix that issue by standardizing the protocol. The idea is that IM would be like email - no central server. Others (GTalk, Facebook, WhatsApp, HipChat to name few) started implementing it but did not enable server to server communication (ok GTalk did, but as soon as they became popular they intentionally broke it with Hangouts). So now we have bunch of services that use same protocol but still can't communicate with each other, the XMPP seems like it is dying. A while ago there were plenty of server-side transports to help migrate to XMPP, but it doesn't seem like they are no longer being developed. I don't understand why no one cares anymore about decentralizing and standardizing IM.
- rekoros 11y ago
  I think because it's a "nice-to-have", not a "must-have". (We have SMTP, a must-have.) There is no such thing as a "nice-to-have" universal protocol.
- zanny 11y ago
  People do care. I'm working on a Qt Matrix client for KDE / maybe eventually Telepathy. The problem is non-techies do not understand why email is good while messaging is bad. There is no indication as to where these problems would come from, and they have no insight into why the problem happens in the first place, while they gleefully eat up iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Skype / Hangouts / Whatsapp.
  - teekert 11y ago
    Because to a non-techy, running a messaging server is just as out of reach as running a mail server. It's just too difficult.
    - iheartmemcache 11y ago
      Lots easier than before. Off the top of my head: 1: You have more than enough 'power users' who keep their machines on 24/7 for torrent seeding. VirtualBox is free & those guys are fairly security conscious as a result of the inherent defensive nature of torrenting (MPAA litigation, etc). Give them a VBox server they can run and they'd happily do it. Now grandma can use his server no problem, in the same way that you only needed 1 techie in your group (pre-AOL) to host an SMTP server. The real difficulty is convincing grandma that she needs to leave "AOL".
voltagex_ 11y ago
You find yourself in the same position that Trillian did, what, 15 years ago? Thanks for giving it a shot, at least. It's getting to the point where if I wanted to keep in touch with most of my friends all the time, I'd need to carry two or more devices (thanks for keeping iMessage closed, Apple).
- mwfunk 11y ago
  iMessage works fine with SMS and MMS.
  - molmalo 11y ago
    Which is absolutely irrelevant. It's expected from a mobile phone to be able to send and receive SMSs. But SMSs can take several minutes to reach its destination in some areas. Long messages are split. And the experience as a whole is totally different. And of course, most people pay per message (individually or as a pack), at least globally. So, if someone wishes to send a message, it shouldn't matter what OS or app is being used by the other party. IF GP uses an Android phone as its primary phone, it may be problem if he is trying to chat with someone who uses only iMessage.
liveoneggs 11y ago
you left out ICB
txdv 11y ago
How have you implemented skype? Have you written a stand alone library which communicates with skype?
- creshal 11y ago
  Skype has a web-based API nowadays that's used by quite a few third-party clients.
akerro 11y ago
Facebook, Google chat and some others XMPP based were compatible and you could chat with Facebook users without having facebook account, but they closed their services making it all incompatible.
amai 11y ago
I think Signal from https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/ deserves to be mentioned, too.
ldarby 11y ago
That PDF suggests Zulip died after being acquired by Dropbox, but that's not the case, they opensourced it: zulip.org
- rekoros 11y ago
  We decided to only include cloud services, so we weren't sure what to do with something you have to run yourself. That said, the line is blurry, we will fix.

by rekoros 11y ago

Apocryphon 11y ago

As it turns out, the tower of Babel is completely self-perpetuating.

brazeon 11y ago

Do you plan on open sourcing plugs or any parts of your system?

rekoros 11y ago
You can see what happens to OS projects that work with WhatsApp, Skype, and some of the other heavily guarded walled gardens -- cease & desist orders, carried out by GitHub. We have absolutely no interest in joining that list, which unfortunately means the answer - for the time being - is no :(
- cyphar 11y ago
  Right, but surely if you're selling it that's much more incentive for a cease and a desist (regardless of whether it is free software).
  - rekoros 11y ago
    Actually I don't think so. The main thing the owners of big networks are afraid of is spam. We provide a ridiculously expensive way to connect, say, Slack to Skype, which is ==great for Skype==, from almost every possible angle. It means Skype users can stay on Skype instead of switching to someone else's Slack team.
    - taurath 11y ago
      In that case great for skype, bad for slack. Someone, somewhere will decide they'd rather force those customers to use their service/client, or else they'd have an open protocol in the first place.
      - rekoros 11y ago
        There's a huge compliance problem with working in someone else's Slack team -- you own none of the resulting data and you don't control access on your end. Email is much better in this way, since everyone gets a copy. With Sameroom you essentially retain the carbon copy semantics of email, but with real-time collaboration. So, I'd argue that it's great for Slack.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

scrollaway 11y ago

Thank you, that PDF is incredibly depressing. By the way, well done on sameroom. I came across your product while working on the stuff I mentioned and it looks like an incredibly useful thing. I really wish you would open source it, though. (Or at least open source some libraries for talking to the protocols you deal with. Especially Hangouts.)

rekoros 11y ago
Thank you! We're so paranoid about getting shut down by Google (Hangouts, no API), Microsoft (Skype, no API), and Facebook (Messenger, no API) that we're not only not open sourcing any of our implementations, we're not even providing a commercial API in fear of having to deal with some form of abuse. That said, the night is young. We hope to eventually gain enough leverage to get the big guys to listen to us.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Ok. It's kind of good to hear the barrier to open sourcing is more legal than commercial. That means it's fixable :) Can I ask you some details on how you went about working with Skype and Hangouts? Did you do the reverse engineering yourself? These are protocols several popular open source projects have been trying to support for years and haven't succeeded. Can I also ask you about your tech stack/languages you used for Sameroom?
  - rekoros 11y ago
    We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work. Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time. The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-open-source-developer-for-a-year-4438568a1cfd#.xnljstik2 https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...). Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

andrey_utkin 11y ago

Out of curiosity: are you leveraging such software as spectrum (spectrum.im) and libpurple? These pieces seem to be a good fit for internal gears of your product. Good luck, you are working on an important problem.

rekoros 11y ago
Hi Andrey - we're not using spectrum.im or libpurple (but are aware of both). We saw that libpurple now supports Telegram, so we may borrow some ideas from them :) Thank you!
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  Please look at Telepathy too.

peteretep 11y ago

It doesn't look like you provide quite what I'm after, which is a single OS X / iOS app that seamlessly connects to all of those, while supporting the differentiating features of each. Would easily shell out $30 for such a thing, and maybe even $10 a month for a licensed version. Setting up "tunnels" between client installs probably gets me fired.

rekoros 11y ago
We focus on connecting teams vs individual productivity. Check out http://meetfranz.com/ http://meetfranz.com/ for a single app option. About getting fired - not if we sell our solution to your IT :) They might like it, actually, since they can a) provide something useful to their user base and b) get a better handle on the chat situation.

donatj 11y ago

The timeline is missing the fact that ICQ converted to Oscar after the AOL acquisition and users on both networks can talk.

rekoros 11y ago
Thanks - will fix.
- alexvoda 11y ago
  Would you mind releasing the source (SVG? Illustaror?) of that very depressing chart under an freedom respecting licence (CC-BY? CC-BY-SA?) and hosting it on something like Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab/Codeplex? I would like to contribute by updating it. Also, I would like to link to it on Wikipedia.

takeda 11y ago

This is so disappointing. Especially Jabber/XMPP was created to fix that issue by standardizing the protocol. The idea is that IM would be like email - no central server. Others (GTalk, Facebook, WhatsApp, HipChat to name few) started implementing it but did not enable server to server communication (ok GTalk did, but as soon as they became popular they intentionally broke it with Hangouts). So now we have bunch of services that use same protocol but still can't communicate with each other, the XMPP seems like it is dying. A while ago there were plenty of server-side transports to help migrate to XMPP, but it doesn't seem like they are no longer being developed. I don't understand why no one cares anymore about decentralizing and standardizing IM.

rekoros 11y ago
I think because it's a "nice-to-have", not a "must-have". (We have SMTP, a must-have.) There is no such thing as a "nice-to-have" universal protocol.
zanny 11y ago
People do care. I'm working on a Qt Matrix client for KDE / maybe eventually Telepathy. The problem is non-techies do not understand why email is good while messaging is bad. There is no indication as to where these problems would come from, and they have no insight into why the problem happens in the first place, while they gleefully eat up iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Skype / Hangouts / Whatsapp.
- teekert 11y ago
  Because to a non-techy, running a messaging server is just as out of reach as running a mail server. It's just too difficult.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Lots easier than before. Off the top of my head: 1: You have more than enough 'power users' who keep their machines on 24/7 for torrent seeding. VirtualBox is free & those guys are fairly security conscious as a result of the inherent defensive nature of torrenting (MPAA litigation, etc). Give them a VBox server they can run and they'd happily do it. Now grandma can use his server no problem, in the same way that you only needed 1 techie in your group (pre-AOL) to host an SMTP server. The real difficulty is convincing grandma that she needs to leave "AOL".

voltagex_ 11y ago

You find yourself in the same position that Trillian did, what, 15 years ago? Thanks for giving it a shot, at least. It's getting to the point where if I wanted to keep in touch with most of my friends all the time, I'd need to carry two or more devices (thanks for keeping iMessage closed, Apple).

mwfunk 11y ago
iMessage works fine with SMS and MMS.
- molmalo 11y ago
  Which is absolutely irrelevant. It's expected from a mobile phone to be able to send and receive SMSs. But SMSs can take several minutes to reach its destination in some areas. Long messages are split. And the experience as a whole is totally different. And of course, most people pay per message (individually or as a pack), at least globally. So, if someone wishes to send a message, it shouldn't matter what OS or app is being used by the other party. IF GP uses an Android phone as its primary phone, it may be problem if he is trying to chat with someone who uses only iMessage.

liveoneggs 11y ago

you left out ICB

txdv 11y ago

How have you implemented skype? Have you written a stand alone library which communicates with skype?

creshal 11y ago
Skype has a web-based API nowadays that's used by quite a few third-party clients.

akerro 11y ago

Facebook, Google chat and some others XMPP based were compatible and you could chat with Facebook users without having facebook account, but they closed their services making it all incompatible.

amai 11y ago

I think Signal from https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/ deserves to be mentioned, too.

ldarby 11y ago

That PDF suggests Zulip died after being acquired by Dropbox, but that's not the case, they opensourced it: zulip.org

rekoros 11y ago
We decided to only include cloud services, so we weren't sure what to do with something you have to run yourself. That said, the line is blurry, we will fix.