> 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 o

> 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.