4 ms·

You are saying it like if XMPP never worked on phones.

comex 10y ago
It didn't work well. But who cares? Even if there were, hypothetically, no possible way to make XMPP work, and Google really needed a custom protocol, they could still have released public documentation for that protocol, and open source client and/or server code. Indeed, that's sort of what they did in 2009 by creating Jingle, an XMPP extension for voice chat, and releasing libjingle. But no such luck for the new stuff. I could understand giving up federation, maybe, since it creates a spam problem. Though for Google to throw up their hands on spam is a bit ironic, given that Hangouts sits inside Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering. But federation was never really necessary: most XMPP clients support multiple accounts, and it's not like there were a lot of huge XMPP services - only one, Google. You just add that as an account in addition to whatever smaller-scale/organizational XMPP servers you use. (You know, the thing people used to use before Slack.) Similarly, most XMPP clients support multiple protocols, so for Hangouts to use a custom protocol is not the end of the world. Annoying, but if the benefits are clear enough… it's fine. But no. Like with most messaging services these days, Hangouts' protocol isn't documented, and nobody has bothered to reverse engineer it. So you're stuck with the official clients. Maybe not the end of the world, since unlike the bad old days of Windows-only clients that left Linux users in the cold, today any desktop OS can use the web client. (And non-top-two mobile OSes don't have enough market share for people to care about their not being supported, and many of them can run Android apps.) Not the end of the world, unless you want all your messaging services in one place - people used to see a lot of benefit in that, and there are a lot more services now. Or you don't like the official design. Or you don't like bloated web clients. Or you prefer free software. Sigh.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  XMPP doesn't work well on phones in part because Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. didn't want it to work well on phones because they wanted their own proprietary messaging services.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  > Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering. If by world class you mean huge amounts of false positives and destroying the ability for people to send messages reliably between one another, then yes. It's totally world class .. a world class failure.
  - comex 10y ago
    As they say, Works For Me. Admittedly, I don't know how many important emails I've lost over the years, but I don't remember ever being contacted elsewhere about an email that turned out to be in spam. I have a bad memory so I might be forgetting some instance, but if so it must not have been terribly important, or I'd remember it… On the flipside, there have almost never been any false negatives. I remember being quite annoyed a while back when there was a brief period where a trickle of spam got through. Other than that, I've been spam-free. (I also remember being IMed by spambots using XMPP federation a few times.) This does come at the cost of letting Google see all my email. I'm not happy about that, but I'm skeptical that a fully encrypted solution could provide filtering as effective. Certainly a self-hosted solution cannot.
  - stordoff 10y ago
    Are there any objective looks at this? I know personally I manually check the spam folder, and out of the hundreds of messages a month that end up there I've never seen anything important get mis-categorised. A few (<<1%) mass emails end up there inadvertently, but nothing that I would notice if I didn't check.
mattmcknight 10y ago
standard complaint was that it was a battery killer.
- aerique 10y ago
  As far as I know, XMPP is still being developed further. The guy who wrote the Android Conversations (.im?) app is on HN and says it is a serious option for phones now. (Except it costs money so most of my WhatsApp contacts will not switch.)

comex 10y ago

It didn't work well. But who cares? Even if there were, hypothetically, no possible way to make XMPP work, and Google really needed a custom protocol, they could still have released public documentation for that protocol, and open source client and/or server code. Indeed, that's sort of what they did in 2009 by creating Jingle, an XMPP extension for voice chat, and releasing libjingle. But no such luck for the new stuff. I could understand giving up federation, maybe, since it creates a spam problem. Though for Google to throw up their hands on spam is a bit ironic, given that Hangouts sits inside Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering. But federation was never really necessary: most XMPP clients support multiple accounts, and it's not like there were a lot of huge XMPP services - only one, Google. You just add that as an account in addition to whatever smaller-scale/organizational XMPP servers you use. (You know, the thing people used to use before Slack.) Similarly, most XMPP clients support multiple protocols, so for Hangouts to use a custom protocol is not the end of the world. Annoying, but if the benefits are clear enough… it's fine. But no. Like with most messaging services these days, Hangouts' protocol isn't documented, and nobody has bothered to reverse engineer it. So you're stuck with the official clients. Maybe not the end of the world, since unlike the bad old days of Windows-only clients that left Linux users in the cold, today any desktop OS can use the web client. (And non-top-two mobile OSes don't have enough market share for people to care about their not being supported, and many of them can run Android apps.) Not the end of the world, unless you want all your messaging services in one place - people used to see a lot of benefit in that, and there are a lot more services now. Or you don't like the official design. Or you don't like bloated web clients. Or you prefer free software. Sigh.

jlarocco 10y ago
XMPP doesn't work well on phones in part because Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. didn't want it to work well on phones because they wanted their own proprietary messaging services.
djsumdog 10y ago
> Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering. If by world class you mean huge amounts of false positives and destroying the ability for people to send messages reliably between one another, then yes. It's totally world class .. a world class failure.
- comex 10y ago
  As they say, Works For Me. Admittedly, I don't know how many important emails I've lost over the years, but I don't remember ever being contacted elsewhere about an email that turned out to be in spam. I have a bad memory so I might be forgetting some instance, but if so it must not have been terribly important, or I'd remember it… On the flipside, there have almost never been any false negatives. I remember being quite annoyed a while back when there was a brief period where a trickle of spam got through. Other than that, I've been spam-free. (I also remember being IMed by spambots using XMPP federation a few times.) This does come at the cost of letting Google see all my email. I'm not happy about that, but I'm skeptical that a fully encrypted solution could provide filtering as effective. Certainly a self-hosted solution cannot.
- stordoff 10y ago
  Are there any objective looks at this? I know personally I manually check the spam folder, and out of the hundreds of messages a month that end up there I've never seen anything important get mis-categorised. A few (<<1%) mass emails end up there inadvertently, but nothing that I would notice if I didn't check.

mattmcknight 10y ago

standard complaint was that it was a battery killer.

aerique 10y ago
As far as I know, XMPP is still being developed further. The guy who wrote the Android Conversations (.im?) app is on HN and says it is a serious option for phones now. (Except it costs money so most of my WhatsApp contacts will not switch.)