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XMPP was never that popular... it was IRC that was the (relatively) widely used open protocol. SMTP was early enough and good enough to get widespread adoption
by blihp 4y ago
XMPP was never that popular... it was IRC that was the (relatively) widely used open protocol.
SMTP was early enough and good enough to get widespread adoption. IRC in its original form was never good enough (esp. re: scaling), so services like AIM were able to step in and were good enough and open enough[1] solution while the open source world stuck with IRC for too long because it 'works for us'. So open standards like IRC never got entrenched the way SMTP did in proprietary solutions and by the late 90's the open source world had become pretty weak on developing new Internet standards that would even get widespread adoption in the open source world.
It's worth noting that there's nothing etched in stone to say that SMTP has won indefinitely. Try setting up a purely open source SMTP server on the Internet these days and see who you can talk to. Google has been making it harder and harder[2] to use non-Google clients with their servers. Slowly but surely, business interests seem to be enveloping SMTP with their own walled gardens... it's just taking longer.
[1] Well, sort of. They actually seemed to want to be proprietary about it. But every time they changed the protocol, the apps that worked with it were able to reverse engineer their changes quickly and AOL didn't fight too hard to prevent them from doing so.
[2] Or at least enough of a chore so that most people won't bother trying.
- jandrese 4y agoIRC was a different usage model too. While you could do direct messages in IRC, it was a side feature and not the primary use case for it. XMPP, AIM, and the like are focused far more on direct messaging with chat rooms being a clunky add-on. Anecdotally I experimented with an XMPP server for awhile and found it far more difficult to start up than an IRC server. It was far more enterprise oriented, assuming you had control over the DNS (only one server per domain of course) and with lots of complexity around LDAP or AD integration. This is as opposed to an IRC server where you downloaded the software, optionally exchanged keys with a peer, and started it up. Using XML as a message format was also a mistake, but not one so bad that it would sink the entire project. ASN.1 would have been a better choice.
- mike_hearn 4y agoAOL didn't fight too hard?! AOL fought the hardest of any of them! AIM interop was by far the most notoriously difficult challenge for alt client devs back in the day because they explicitly fought alt clients, whereas MSN Messenger, ICQ etc didn't bother. The trick I remember the most was really quite clever - the server started sending hash challenges to the clients i.e. a random byte range into the client binary. The client had to respond with a hash within a timeout or else the server disconnected them. The trick was, because the challenges were randomly generated you couldn't make a database of them, but also, the copyright license on the client forbade people redistributing it. Eventually it was worked around of course, people set up servers to answer the oracle queries that clients could relay to, but it really disrupted the alt messenger scene for quite a while. And in turn that meant it screwed people who wanted to use Linux because AIM was the number 1 social network in the USA during this period (though it's all forgotten now and was never as big in Europe, where MSN dominated).