5 ms·

I wonder if part of what caused this was poor mobile support for the existing standards. It makes sense that the companies would be incentivized to make chat a

I wonder if part of what caused this was poor mobile support for the existing standards. It makes sense that the companies would be incentivized to make chat applications that were not interoperable, but I think the really bad state of existing standards allowed this door to be more open than it would have been otherwise.

rubyn00bie 8y ago
A lot of people didn’t understand it then. Text messaging, in the pre-iPhone era, is what killed IM... and then it “came back” so to speak as a contentious feature of mobile phones (iMessage, Hangouts). Text messaging won because everyone had a phone number and smart-phones/data services were seen by the masses as unnecessary or a luxury. When most people send a “text” they’re sending an IM be it over WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Hangouts (or whatever google’s is these days), Slack, etc so it really does suck we’ve gone full circle ended up where we started. From the sounds of it, looks like it’s time for some work on making XMPP sexy.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  That's true and certainly the "global protocol" for lack of a better term on iOS is iMessage. Either using a phone # or email it doesn't matter, and they managed to get 95% of the people all talking to each other. <Insert speculation about the total # of iMessage users being more than possibly either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn> That said, although people might be wary of the dominant messaging platform coming from the OS vendor, I don't see how Google can really connect everyone unless they are the ones who do it. If only their messaging strategy was consistent - and not half assed, they might get somewhere.
  - asdff 8y ago
    iMessage is only popular because it functions exactly the same as SMS on an iphone aside from the color of your chat bubble, and the software defaults to it over SMS. If Apple separated iMessage and SMS into two apps, it would have failed.
    - jethro_tell 8y ago
      What's crazy, is google is still trying to figure out how to get sms/chat/video call into a single app like 7 years later. How can this be so hard to see as adding massive value? my iFriends have had iMessage for half a decade, and I've seen so many chat apps from google I've given up and gone with something else in the mean time.
      - fossuser 8y ago
        The saddest part of this to me is that Google had a huge head start with Google Voice which they let languish for years. When I realized I was being silently dropped from group messages because they were MMS and voice couldn't support it (which lead to people thinking I was ignoring them) I moved everything to Apple. Since then they've released and killed a bunch of chat applications that have all been pretty poor - as an outsider it seems like something is pretty wrong with how they're handling that strategy.
        jethro_tell 8y ago
        And what's crazy, is it's so obvious, and so easy that every other chat app out there has basically converged on exactly the same fucking thing.
    - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      Not sure what you're implying, but that was frankly the only solution if you wanted to create something that could be used by the majority of people with iOS devices. Proprietary "sugar" on top of standard protocols is almost the de facto answer for how Apple operates these days. Their efforts to get the extra stuff past standards bodies (so that everyone can use it) is at times hit or miss, but I'm increasingly convinced the overall approach is correct. Why Google can't do this on Android is an open question.
- fossuser 8y ago
  Before iMessage and Hangouts there was Meego which was an attempt to bring back the chat applications on smart phones with an XMPP client, but the protocols weren't good enough (and the app wasn't very good either). Without mobile first considerations you'd lose history or miss messages on the phone making it pretty unreliable. When anything else came along that was better it was used instead. Any network advantage XMPP had quickly died as people moved on to things that actually worked (most of which were walled gardens).
CydeWeys 8y ago
It's the input method that did it for me. Typing out text on a smartphone isn't pleasurable for me.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  What I noticed is once people started using mobile devices the richness of their messages/posts/comments declined radically.
jethro_tell 8y ago
My guess is that it's a few things: 1. Long form convo on mobile sucks, so instead we send memes but chat just wasn't ready for that. 2. iMessage defaulting to non SMS but proprietary, now sms has the features we want in mobile conversations like quick picture sharing, likes, memes, consistent emojis. 3. At the advent of iMessage, google had talk and could easily have transparently merged sms and xmpp in a shiny competitor that was cross platform, and worked everywhere. They failed to see any value in this, and instead have released a revolving door of halfass chat apps, half the time more than one at once, with a subset of the features of any normal chat app. 4. From there, everyone just made a platform specific chat app, because cross platform ease of use was of no value as there was no competition in that space.

rubyn00bie 8y ago

A lot of people didn’t understand it then. Text messaging, in the pre-iPhone era, is what killed IM... and then it “came back” so to speak as a contentious feature of mobile phones (iMessage, Hangouts). Text messaging won because everyone had a phone number and smart-phones/data services were seen by the masses as unnecessary or a luxury. When most people send a “text” they’re sending an IM be it over WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Hangouts (or whatever google’s is these days), Slack, etc so it really does suck we’ve gone full circle ended up where we started. From the sounds of it, looks like it’s time for some work on making XMPP sexy.

chrisfinazzo 8y ago
That's true and certainly the "global protocol" for lack of a better term on iOS is iMessage. Either using a phone # or email it doesn't matter, and they managed to get 95% of the people all talking to each other. <Insert speculation about the total # of iMessage users being more than possibly either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn> That said, although people might be wary of the dominant messaging platform coming from the OS vendor, I don't see how Google can really connect everyone unless they are the ones who do it. If only their messaging strategy was consistent - and not half assed, they might get somewhere.
- asdff 8y ago
  iMessage is only popular because it functions exactly the same as SMS on an iphone aside from the color of your chat bubble, and the software defaults to it over SMS. If Apple separated iMessage and SMS into two apps, it would have failed.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    What's crazy, is google is still trying to figure out how to get sms/chat/video call into a single app like 7 years later. How can this be so hard to see as adding massive value? my iFriends have had iMessage for half a decade, and I've seen so many chat apps from google I've given up and gone with something else in the mean time.
    - fossuser 8y ago
      The saddest part of this to me is that Google had a huge head start with Google Voice which they let languish for years. When I realized I was being silently dropped from group messages because they were MMS and voice couldn't support it (which lead to people thinking I was ignoring them) I moved everything to Apple. Since then they've released and killed a bunch of chat applications that have all been pretty poor - as an outsider it seems like something is pretty wrong with how they're handling that strategy.
      - jethro_tell 8y ago
        And what's crazy, is it's so obvious, and so easy that every other chat app out there has basically converged on exactly the same fucking thing.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Not sure what you're implying, but that was frankly the only solution if you wanted to create something that could be used by the majority of people with iOS devices. Proprietary "sugar" on top of standard protocols is almost the de facto answer for how Apple operates these days. Their efforts to get the extra stuff past standards bodies (so that everyone can use it) is at times hit or miss, but I'm increasingly convinced the overall approach is correct. Why Google can't do this on Android is an open question.
fossuser 8y ago
Before iMessage and Hangouts there was Meego which was an attempt to bring back the chat applications on smart phones with an XMPP client, but the protocols weren't good enough (and the app wasn't very good either). Without mobile first considerations you'd lose history or miss messages on the phone making it pretty unreliable. When anything else came along that was better it was used instead. Any network advantage XMPP had quickly died as people moved on to things that actually worked (most of which were walled gardens).

CydeWeys 8y ago

It's the input method that did it for me. Typing out text on a smartphone isn't pleasurable for me.

Gibbon1 8y ago
What I noticed is once people started using mobile devices the richness of their messages/posts/comments declined radically.

jethro_tell 8y ago

My guess is that it's a few things: 1. Long form convo on mobile sucks, so instead we send memes but chat just wasn't ready for that. 2. iMessage defaulting to non SMS but proprietary, now sms has the features we want in mobile conversations like quick picture sharing, likes, memes, consistent emojis. 3. At the advent of iMessage, google had talk and could easily have transparently merged sms and xmpp in a shiny competitor that was cross platform, and worked everywhere. They failed to see any value in this, and instead have released a revolving door of halfass chat apps, half the time more than one at once, with a subset of the features of any normal chat app. 4. From there, everyone just made a platform specific chat app, because cross platform ease of use was of no value as there was no competition in that space.