Google Talk was XMPP from start to finish. At its peak, Google folk participated in the standards process. They also contributed various protocol extensions, in

Google Talk was XMPP from start to finish. At its peak, Google folk participated in the standards process. They also contributed various protocol extensions, including the one for audio/video calls. Their open-source implementation of this (libjingle) still lives on as a part of their WebRTC stack in Chrome. You're spot on with your memory of early XMPP's behaviour. While it was one of the first messaging protocols to support simultaneous login, the focus was originally about routing messages to the right device. In the context of that period in tech, that was excusable and even desirable. As people got more devices connected, more permanently yet intermittently (i.e. smartphones), it stopped making any sense. We switched to a broadcast-and-sync approach, but it took a long time (years) for all the long tail of smaller internal deployments to roll that out (if they ever did). Another big issue was that one of the most popular clients was Pidgin, which ran into developer resource issues around the same time and still hasn't caught up yet. To many people though, this was XMPP. I'm hoping a new generation of XMPP implementations can solve these kinds of issues, which was what inspired my "Products vs Protocols" [1] talk/article a couple of years ago, and is why I work on Snikket (and we have many happy users who are both new and not-so-new to XMPP). [1]: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/