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The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers. As a simpl

The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers. As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well (so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one application. There was no real downside to another account on another service, you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go. Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end. This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced features they wanted. We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch. There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).

heymijo 7y ago
Very nice post, however, I recall a bit differently... "I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple." RIM and BBM had a four year head start on Apple messaging. Unless Apple had a pre-mobile messaging protcol that I am unaware of. Even so, BBM was the hotness back then and people were lining up to buy a Blackberry just so they could use its exclusive messaging service.
- riffraff 7y ago
  my feeling was that Skype killed all other IMs. It solved the need for chats while also allowing calls. The fact it's still not totally erased after a decade of worsening is a testament to its original status. EDIT: And popular chat clients like pidgin did not support skype, so you had to have skype + pidgin/adium or whatever. And then at some point you just drop one..
userbinator 7y ago
It's worth noting that MSNP, the protocol Microsoft used for MSN messenger, was actually submitted to the IETF as a draft: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc... From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML, whereas MSNP was a line-based textual protocol closer to a mix of IRC and HTTP. I found MSNP simple enough that I wrote a client and used it right up until Microsoft shut down their servers. Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited) use today.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML I'm not making a case it was the best, or only protocol, but it existed and was popular, and importantly, was the protocol that Apple, Google and Facebook all used in their initial forays into the space. That is, not only were they originally using open standards, they they were originally all using the same standard and could interoperate with each other easily if desired. That's important because it shows just how far we went. Literally from one end of the spectrum (fully open and interoperable on a client level) to the other (closed proprietary standards and enforced incompatibility). > Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited) use today. Sure, I wasn't making a case that they died, just that we were sold an implied bill of goods that was bogus. There was no reason at the time to not use gtalk more than AIM as many people that had AIM eventually got a google/Gmail account (or Apple ichat one, or Facebook one), and to focus on those more. And new people didn't see the need to get an AIM/ICQ account because everyone they talked to had a way to reach them on those major platforms with those accounts they also got. If we were back at the time people were signing up for accounts, and people were presented with the choice of getting a dedicated IM account in addition to their gchat or ichat or facebook one knowing that their bigcorp one would be closed to outside networks soon, I think a lot more would have done so.
paulryanrogers 7y ago
IIRC one of the reasons XMPP has fallen out of favor with even the federation movements is that it's original core is so small, and optional extensions (XEPs) so many, that no service could reliably interoperate with all the features users came to expect. It was also not designed with high latency and battery requirements in mind, such as mobile phones have. Apparently Matrix is trying to pick up where XMPP has failed.
smadge 7y ago
I don’t think that the web or email would have been adopted if they had been invented in today’s environment. Both fundamentally allow for communication across the “garden wall.” I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that both came from research institutes and instead of for profit corporations.

heymijo 7y ago

Very nice post, however, I recall a bit differently... "I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple." RIM and BBM had a four year head start on Apple messaging. Unless Apple had a pre-mobile messaging protcol that I am unaware of. Even so, BBM was the hotness back then and people were lining up to buy a Blackberry just so they could use its exclusive messaging service.

riffraff 7y ago
my feeling was that Skype killed all other IMs. It solved the need for chats while also allowing calls. The fact it's still not totally erased after a decade of worsening is a testament to its original status. EDIT: And popular chat clients like pidgin did not support skype, so you had to have skype + pidgin/adium or whatever. And then at some point you just drop one..

userbinator 7y ago

It's worth noting that MSNP, the protocol Microsoft used for MSN messenger, was actually submitted to the IETF as a draft: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc... From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML, whereas MSNP was a line-based textual protocol closer to a mix of IRC and HTTP. I found MSNP simple enough that I wrote a client and used it right up until Microsoft shut down their servers. Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited) use today.

kbenson 7y ago
> From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML I'm not making a case it was the best, or only protocol, but it existed and was popular, and importantly, was the protocol that Apple, Google and Facebook all used in their initial forays into the space. That is, not only were they originally using open standards, they they were originally all using the same standard and could interoperate with each other easily if desired. That's important because it shows just how far we went. Literally from one end of the spectrum (fully open and interoperable on a client level) to the other (closed proprietary standards and enforced incompatibility). > Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited) use today. Sure, I wasn't making a case that they died, just that we were sold an implied bill of goods that was bogus. There was no reason at the time to not use gtalk more than AIM as many people that had AIM eventually got a google/Gmail account (or Apple ichat one, or Facebook one), and to focus on those more. And new people didn't see the need to get an AIM/ICQ account because everyone they talked to had a way to reach them on those major platforms with those accounts they also got. If we were back at the time people were signing up for accounts, and people were presented with the choice of getting a dedicated IM account in addition to their gchat or ichat or facebook one knowing that their bigcorp one would be closed to outside networks soon, I think a lot more would have done so.

paulryanrogers 7y ago

IIRC one of the reasons XMPP has fallen out of favor with even the federation movements is that it's original core is so small, and optional extensions (XEPs) so many, that no service could reliably interoperate with all the features users came to expect. It was also not designed with high latency and battery requirements in mind, such as mobile phones have. Apparently Matrix is trying to pick up where XMPP has failed.

smadge 7y ago

I don’t think that the web or email would have been adopted if they had been invented in today’s environment. Both fundamentally allow for communication across the “garden wall.” I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that both came from research institutes and instead of for profit corporations.