The technical merits and drawbacks of XMPP aside, deployment only works if there's an appetite from deployers. For high-visibility consumer chat that average pe

The technical merits and drawbacks of XMPP aside, deployment only works if there's an appetite from deployers. For high-visibility consumer chat that average people use, this appetite has vanished. Around the mid-2000s, IM networks started getting tired of constantly changing their protocols to thwart third-party reverse engineering efforts like Microsoft logging into AIM, libpurple (Pidgin), or Trillian. But then Google Talk appeared [1] in 2006 inside the coveted invite-only Gmail, supporting XMPP, and significantly raised the bar. So interoperability became a tool to maintain market share. The underdogs WLM and Yahoo started seamless interop [1] in July 2006, while Google Talk and AIM started a limited interop [1] in 2007. AIM briefly dabbled with XMPP it in 2008 [2] (great source -- see comments for AIM's response). In the meantime, Facebook opened up for everyone, introduced Chat and rapidly lured away the myspace/AIM generation, becoming a major player in chat. Facebook introduced XMPP in February 2010 [3] but discontinued it [4] in 2015 after having deprecated it the year prior. This neatly coincided with their announcement to monetize the Messenger ecosystem, in ways that require a captive client [5]. Other vendors are similarly pursuing monetization within the client -- Snapchat and Kik as a content portal [6][7][8][9], Google as a context-aware assistant, Microsoft is lost at sea, Whatsapp as a Facebook data mining scheme, the Asian apps as a combination of all other techniques and microtranactions -- when anyone can bring a third-party client, their monetization strategy suffers. This makes XMPP's deployment future exceedingly bleak, perhaps restricted solely to corporate deployments. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080120143857/http://florianjensen.com/2008/01/17/aol-adopting-xmpp-aka-jabber/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080120143857/http://florianjen... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20100318030410/http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=361 http://web.archive.org/web/20100318030410/http://developers.... [4] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat [5] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/03/25/introducing-messenger-platform-and-businesses-on-messenger/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/03/25/introdu... [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11935956#11941090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11935956#11941090 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000854#12002773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000854#12002773 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12272973#12273447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12272973#12273447