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Yes but email also used to be fragmented and walled garden'ed back in the early days of networking. Chat is still in its infancy as a technology. We are still
by mojuba 6y ago
Yes but email also used to be fragmented and walled garden'ed back in the early days of networking.
Chat is still in its infancy as a technology. We are still trying to figure things out: what's the minimal necessary feature set? What should a server API provide to clients?
And a myriad of behavior/feature/privacy questions that different messaging systems handle differently, for example: what happens when I leave a group chat - should others see me leaving? Can I leave quietly? Should I have a choice?
Or: when I join a group, do I get access to the entire message history? Or: what happens when I block someone and then later message them - should the message history be restored? This and many other privacy related problems are handled in as many ways as there are messaging systems in wide use.
Let alone handling of audio and video calls.
Messaging and its feature set should stabilize as a standard way of communication before we can say to everyone: OK so now there's no reason you shouldn't use a standard protocol. If you don't, you are definitely a bad guy. Today though it's still not easy to make a case for standardization, in my opinion.
- bosswipe 6y agoChat is not in its infancy, it has been around almost as long as email.
- rebuilder 6y agoIsn't having a well-specified protocol how you get features to stabilizes?
- mprovost 6y agoICQ came out in 1996, AIM in 1997, and MSN in 1999. I don't think it's fair to give the people working on this a pass by saying this is a new problem - working products have been shipping for over 20 years. Some of the devs working on Signal and Matrix were probably born after ICQ was released. The reality is that all of these systems, including email, tend towards becoming walled gardens. Otherwise you end up with the same problem that email has which is that a huge percentage of it is spam. At this point email is basically a few connected walled gardens from the major providers. Before that the amount of spam was even larger.
- OldTimeCoffee 6y agoPart of the problem is that previously they were a value add as part of a service provider. There was no intent to generate revenue from it because the revenue came from the provider's operations. If I'm building a chat client now, though, I've got to find a revenue path. You need the walled garden so that you get lock-in and can find a revenue model from it.
- mojuba 6y agoThe problem is not in which year it started but whether the feature set is stable enough to be standardized - see my questions in the original comment. And that's just a few of them.
- mprovost 6y agoEach of these chat applications have answered the questions you raised in their own way. Since we haven't converged on a single set of standard behaviours in 20+ years, it probably means there isn't a single right answer.