5 ms·

Windows Live Messenger supports XMPP

96 points by mweibel 15y ago

losethos 15y ago
10 i = i + 15 20 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i 30 IF i > 99999 THEN i = 0: GOTO 10 40 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 10 50 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i God says... Line 16755 destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed. 7:24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them. 7:25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God. 7:26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.
Slimy 15y ago
I wonder if this is because Microsoft is becoming better and better at embracing open source when it sees a business advantage to do so, or if it's simply a last-ditch effort to keep Messenger alive as more and more people use it less frequently or not at all because the likes of smartphones, apps, and Facebook (Chat) are becoming more widely adopted.
- Animus7 15y ago
  Doesn't this basically summarize Microsoft's entire business strategy these days? Wait until some piece of tech is firmly entrenched, then move to implement your own instance, more often than not with an enterprise angle. More often than not infuriatingly incompatible unless your entire stack is Microsoft. This happened with iPhone, cloud hosting, touch/tablet OS's; the list is endless. The only surprising thing is it took them this long to realize that Live Messenger needed to get onboard with Jabber if it's going to survive.
  - PakG1 15y ago
    Wasn't that Microsoft's playbook from the very beginning? Industry writers were commenting on that behaviour in the 80s and 90s. Microsoft was always better copying other people's ideas and outcompeting them in the late game.
- pilgrim689 15y ago
  I'm guessing it's the former. In the past 2 weeks I've heard MS submit a patch to Redis, they've helped bring Node.js to Windows, Phil Haack joined GitHub primarily to bring C# into that open source community's limelight,... and now this. Seems to me like someone's been pushing the open source agenda within Microsoft.
  - mweibel 15y ago
    Seems like Microsoft is becoming more likeable recently. I hope this happens for their main products, too :)
    - Jugglernaut 15y ago
      They are not the Dark Knight anymore. The cape is fluttering in Cupertino now.
  - shanselman 15y ago
    We're glad you've noticed. There's lot more to come in the next 6-9 months, and beyond. Signed, A kinder, gentler Death Star
lloeki 15y ago
It still looks a bit rough, e.g "Roster management is not supported". I wish it would not end up being just a client concern but also impact server-side at some point thanks to XMPP federation. Google Talk does federation but last time I checked Facebook Chat did not. Such a shame.
- nknight 15y ago
  Apparently Messenger does link with Facebook and Yahoo, but I don't see anything indicating a general federation. It occurs to me that IM services have established a twisted, mutant, incompletely-routed version of an IRC network amongst themselves. And as far as I can tell, they still haven't gotten group chat right...
  - zokier 15y ago
    What's wrong with XMPP multi-user chat? And I don't understand your argument of "incompletely-routed", especially if compared to IRC. imho XMPP federation is much more powerful concept than IRC networking.
    - darklajid 15y ago
      His argument seems to be that MS ties into Facebook Chat, but not using XMPP federation (since that seems to be disabled on FB's side). So - it's behind the scene. It's (by a stretch) comparable to IRC links, maybe. The complain about group chat was, as far as I understand the GP, not about XMPP multi-user chat, but about the inability to _use_ that if you're not using real XMPP federation. In other words: How do you start a group chat from GTalk with your MS Messenger / Facebook friends? The technology would support it, but 'they still don't get it right'. I agree.
    - nknight 15y ago
      > What's wrong with XMPP multi-user chat? I was speaking more generally than XMPP. I don't know the fundamental causes, but I haven't seen group/multi-user chat work reliably in years -- I think the last time I did, everybody was on ICQ using official clients. The problems I have encountered are: 1) Group chats just don't start. 2) Not everyone can see/"hear" everyone else. 3) Rarely, #2 starting and stopping randomly for people. I've seen these behaviors on chats with as few as 3 people, up to 8ish (don't think I've ever gone higher than that). I doubt the protocols are fundamentally broken in this regard, I assume I'm encountering implementation bugs, but they seem to be pervasive. > And I don't understand your argument of "incompletely-routed", especially if compared to IRC. "incompletely-routed" may not be a good phrase to use here, least of all because not many people "get" IRC anymore. IRC networks eventually stabilized into a model whereby there was network-wide coordination of routing. Every server on a network can talk to every other server, and there is no leakage outside of the network. You know what you're getting when you connect to one of the major networks. With IM, links may be established between A and B, and B and C, but not A and C. > imho XMPP federation is much more powerful concept than IRC networking. I would absolutely agree in so far as the intent of XMPP federation goes. In practice, there are two problems: 1) Some IM providers intentionally cripple it (e.g. Facebook). 2) Not all IM providers use XMPP in the first place. Even some of the ones that make available a limited XMPP interface don't actually base their services off of it (Facebook, Microsoft). It's important to realize that IM is not the same as XMPP, so when I say "IM", I mean "IM", not the XMPP subclass. :)
nodata 15y ago
Here it comes again: embrace and extend.
beagle3 15y ago
I was involved with the effort [to avoid] standardizing instant messaging back in 1999-2000. One of the products the company I was with at the time was offering was an instant messenger (with a twist that is not important for this story), so we tried to support all the prevailing protocols of the time (AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, PowWow, IRC, ... I don't even remember). And I was eagerly following the instant messaging standardisation effort at the IETF. What became painfully clear to me after a while was that the big guys (AOL=AIM+ICQ, MS, YAHOO) who were running the show were all actively making sure that no standard would be decided upon. It was all dressed up in technical arguments, so it didn't look that way, but it was. Perhaps the engineers participating in the discussion weren't even aware -- it's easy to miss the big picture -- but as an outsider it was painfully obvious that the effective mandate that was given by the respective companies to their representative was to NOT standardize anything. What ended up being the IETF standard was Jabber -- which was way too complicated and wasteful. And the reason it ended up that way was that while the big guys were avoiding standardisation, someone just put out an open source / open spec product which -- with all its deficiencies -- eventually worked well enough to gain non-trivial adoption, including by the IETF. And all of that happened awhile after the instant messaging working group was disbanded because of "irreconcilable differences" -- those differences being that every participant would only accept a standard that forced others to concede defeat and implement that participant's existing system (always in a way that limited everyone except said participant, of course) Watching those discussions was an eye opener about how things supposedly work (and even look that way on the surface), and how they really work. EDIT: REMOVED claim that Jabber/XMPP is still too complicated. I'm sure it still has 90% bandwidth and parsing overhead compared to comparable protocols (unless it's become backward incompatible), but standards have changed, and I guess that's no longer considered wasteful or bad engineering practice. EDIT: ADDED: Just to be clear, this is an anecdote about the distant past (as in, 12 years ago now!). I have not been following Jabber/XMPP closely since 2004 and not at all since 2006 or so. Back in the day it was ill-and-under specified, ridiculously chatty (as in >90% overhead before you count TCP headers, both in bandwidth and parsing). What is acceptable has changed since then (no one cares about 95% overhead anymore), and for all I know all the kinks have been worked out. And for the good parts - it is out there, there are multiple server and client implementation, and it works. That's a thousand times better than the product I was working on at the time, which was proprietary closed source, and though it was super efficient in every way, was discontinued and is no longer available.
conradfr 15y ago
From a user point of view Microsoft butchered Messenger a long time ago. That's why Facebook killed it very easily. First the official client (which I never stoud btw) became shittier with each release. Then they made that (very very) bad Facebook copy and forced users to display their real name instead of nicknames. Moreover Messenger suffers from protocol version fragmentation. Features in alternative clients are random. Some people see nicknames, others real names, some are unaware that their real name is displayed. Sometimes you get old avatars, sometimes new ones, sometimes you don't even know that your avatar does not work. Same for offline messaging, and multi-connection. And sadly Pidgin MSN's implementation SUCKS and it was a bad day when their survey indicated that people wanted up-to-date support and they just dismissed it.
- grandpoobah 15y ago
  I've never seen an alternative implementation of MSN that didn't suck. I've worked with the MSN protocol quite a bit, and the older versions were very nice in their simplicity. All the new XML junk they've added ruined it for me.
xlevus 15y ago
A step in the right direction IMO. Now, I hope the other protocols I use such as Skype, Steam (And I guess Origin too) would follow suit. I would love to know when my friends are playing games, without having to be tied to either wine, virtualbox, or my gaming PC or yet another client.
albertzeyer 15y ago
Does that also mean that I can send messages to Messenger from other XMPP networks (and also the other way around)?
- asdfaoeu 15y ago
  There's no federation so no.
helipad 15y ago
It's amazing to think how ubiquitous MSN Messenger was as a teen growing up, and how its use seemed to evaporate overnight with the coming of social networks and cheap text messaging. Funny to me how asynchronous messaging seems to be more useful to people - would not have predicted that.
okoni 15y ago
Is this live yet ? Just tried to add msn contacts to my jabber client and we couldn't make it work.
- k33l0r 15y ago
  They use a proprietary authentication mechanism, so you can't just use any XMPP client... The client-to-server authentication used is SASL, with a specific and proprietary mechanism called X_MESSENGER_OAUTH2. ... Which means that all current XMPP clients are NOT able to connect to messenger.live.com. http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/details_on_msns_xmpp_server/ http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/details_on_msns_...
k33l0r 15y ago
Have any third party XMPP clients implemented the proprietary X_MESSENGER_OAUTH2 authentication mechanism yet? Or is there a way to get the authentication to work with existing clients? Is it on the roadmap for Pidgin (or libpidgin) or Adium? I tried doing some quick Googling, but I couldn't find any answers...

96 points by mweibel 15y ago

10 i = i + 15 20 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i 30 IF i > 99999 THEN i = 0: GOTO 10 40 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 10 50 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i God says... Line 16755 destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed. 7:24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them. 7:25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God. 7:26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.

Slimy 15y ago

I wonder if this is because Microsoft is becoming better and better at embracing open source when it sees a business advantage to do so, or if it's simply a last-ditch effort to keep Messenger alive as more and more people use it less frequently or not at all because the likes of smartphones, apps, and Facebook (Chat) are becoming more widely adopted.

Animus7 15y ago
Doesn't this basically summarize Microsoft's entire business strategy these days? Wait until some piece of tech is firmly entrenched, then move to implement your own instance, more often than not with an enterprise angle. More often than not infuriatingly incompatible unless your entire stack is Microsoft. This happened with iPhone, cloud hosting, touch/tablet OS's; the list is endless. The only surprising thing is it took them this long to realize that Live Messenger needed to get onboard with Jabber if it's going to survive.
- PakG1 15y ago
  Wasn't that Microsoft's playbook from the very beginning? Industry writers were commenting on that behaviour in the 80s and 90s. Microsoft was always better copying other people's ideas and outcompeting them in the late game.
pilgrim689 15y ago
I'm guessing it's the former. In the past 2 weeks I've heard MS submit a patch to Redis, they've helped bring Node.js to Windows, Phil Haack joined GitHub primarily to bring C# into that open source community's limelight,... and now this. Seems to me like someone's been pushing the open source agenda within Microsoft.
- mweibel 15y ago
  Seems like Microsoft is becoming more likeable recently. I hope this happens for their main products, too :)
  - Jugglernaut 15y ago
    They are not the Dark Knight anymore. The cape is fluttering in Cupertino now.
- shanselman 15y ago
  We're glad you've noticed. There's lot more to come in the next 6-9 months, and beyond. Signed, A kinder, gentler Death Star

lloeki 15y ago

It still looks a bit rough, e.g "Roster management is not supported". I wish it would not end up being just a client concern but also impact server-side at some point thanks to XMPP federation. Google Talk does federation but last time I checked Facebook Chat did not. Such a shame.

nknight 15y ago
Apparently Messenger does link with Facebook and Yahoo, but I don't see anything indicating a general federation. It occurs to me that IM services have established a twisted, mutant, incompletely-routed version of an IRC network amongst themselves. And as far as I can tell, they still haven't gotten group chat right...
- zokier 15y ago
  What's wrong with XMPP multi-user chat? And I don't understand your argument of "incompletely-routed", especially if compared to IRC. imho XMPP federation is much more powerful concept than IRC networking.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    His argument seems to be that MS ties into Facebook Chat, but not using XMPP federation (since that seems to be disabled on FB's side). So - it's behind the scene. It's (by a stretch) comparable to IRC links, maybe. The complain about group chat was, as far as I understand the GP, not about XMPP multi-user chat, but about the inability to _use_ that if you're not using real XMPP federation. In other words: How do you start a group chat from GTalk with your MS Messenger / Facebook friends? The technology would support it, but 'they still don't get it right'. I agree.
  - nknight 15y ago
    > What's wrong with XMPP multi-user chat? I was speaking more generally than XMPP. I don't know the fundamental causes, but I haven't seen group/multi-user chat work reliably in years -- I think the last time I did, everybody was on ICQ using official clients. The problems I have encountered are: 1) Group chats just don't start. 2) Not everyone can see/"hear" everyone else. 3) Rarely, #2 starting and stopping randomly for people. I've seen these behaviors on chats with as few as 3 people, up to 8ish (don't think I've ever gone higher than that). I doubt the protocols are fundamentally broken in this regard, I assume I'm encountering implementation bugs, but they seem to be pervasive. > And I don't understand your argument of "incompletely-routed", especially if compared to IRC. "incompletely-routed" may not be a good phrase to use here, least of all because not many people "get" IRC anymore. IRC networks eventually stabilized into a model whereby there was network-wide coordination of routing. Every server on a network can talk to every other server, and there is no leakage outside of the network. You know what you're getting when you connect to one of the major networks. With IM, links may be established between A and B, and B and C, but not A and C. > imho XMPP federation is much more powerful concept than IRC networking. I would absolutely agree in so far as the intent of XMPP federation goes. In practice, there are two problems: 1) Some IM providers intentionally cripple it (e.g. Facebook). 2) Not all IM providers use XMPP in the first place. Even some of the ones that make available a limited XMPP interface don't actually base their services off of it (Facebook, Microsoft). It's important to realize that IM is not the same as XMPP, so when I say "IM", I mean "IM", not the XMPP subclass. :)

nodata 15y ago

Here it comes again: embrace and extend.

beagle3 15y ago

I was involved with the effort [to avoid] standardizing instant messaging back in 1999-2000. One of the products the company I was with at the time was offering was an instant messenger (with a twist that is not important for this story), so we tried to support all the prevailing protocols of the time (AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, PowWow, IRC, ... I don't even remember). And I was eagerly following the instant messaging standardisation effort at the IETF. What became painfully clear to me after a while was that the big guys (AOL=AIM+ICQ, MS, YAHOO) who were running the show were all actively making sure that no standard would be decided upon. It was all dressed up in technical arguments, so it didn't look that way, but it was. Perhaps the engineers participating in the discussion weren't even aware -- it's easy to miss the big picture -- but as an outsider it was painfully obvious that the effective mandate that was given by the respective companies to their representative was to NOT standardize anything. What ended up being the IETF standard was Jabber -- which was way too complicated and wasteful. And the reason it ended up that way was that while the big guys were avoiding standardisation, someone just put out an open source / open spec product which -- with all its deficiencies -- eventually worked well enough to gain non-trivial adoption, including by the IETF. And all of that happened awhile after the instant messaging working group was disbanded because of "irreconcilable differences" -- those differences being that every participant would only accept a standard that forced others to concede defeat and implement that participant's existing system (always in a way that limited everyone except said participant, of course) Watching those discussions was an eye opener about how things supposedly work (and even look that way on the surface), and how they really work. EDIT: REMOVED claim that Jabber/XMPP is still too complicated. I'm sure it still has 90% bandwidth and parsing overhead compared to comparable protocols (unless it's become backward incompatible), but standards have changed, and I guess that's no longer considered wasteful or bad engineering practice. EDIT: ADDED: Just to be clear, this is an anecdote about the distant past (as in, 12 years ago now!). I have not been following Jabber/XMPP closely since 2004 and not at all since 2006 or so. Back in the day it was ill-and-under specified, ridiculously chatty (as in >90% overhead before you count TCP headers, both in bandwidth and parsing). What is acceptable has changed since then (no one cares about 95% overhead anymore), and for all I know all the kinks have been worked out. And for the good parts - it is out there, there are multiple server and client implementation, and it works. That's a thousand times better than the product I was working on at the time, which was proprietary closed source, and though it was super efficient in every way, was discontinued and is no longer available.

conradfr 15y ago

From a user point of view Microsoft butchered Messenger a long time ago. That's why Facebook killed it very easily. First the official client (which I never stoud btw) became shittier with each release. Then they made that (very very) bad Facebook copy and forced users to display their real name instead of nicknames. Moreover Messenger suffers from protocol version fragmentation. Features in alternative clients are random. Some people see nicknames, others real names, some are unaware that their real name is displayed. Sometimes you get old avatars, sometimes new ones, sometimes you don't even know that your avatar does not work. Same for offline messaging, and multi-connection. And sadly Pidgin MSN's implementation SUCKS and it was a bad day when their survey indicated that people wanted up-to-date support and they just dismissed it.

grandpoobah 15y ago
I've never seen an alternative implementation of MSN that didn't suck. I've worked with the MSN protocol quite a bit, and the older versions were very nice in their simplicity. All the new XML junk they've added ruined it for me.

xlevus 15y ago

A step in the right direction IMO. Now, I hope the other protocols I use such as Skype, Steam (And I guess Origin too) would follow suit. I would love to know when my friends are playing games, without having to be tied to either wine, virtualbox, or my gaming PC or yet another client.

albertzeyer 15y ago

Does that also mean that I can send messages to Messenger from other XMPP networks (and also the other way around)?

asdfaoeu 15y ago
There's no federation so no.

helipad 15y ago

It's amazing to think how ubiquitous MSN Messenger was as a teen growing up, and how its use seemed to evaporate overnight with the coming of social networks and cheap text messaging. Funny to me how asynchronous messaging seems to be more useful to people - would not have predicted that.

okoni 15y ago

Is this live yet ? Just tried to add msn contacts to my jabber client and we couldn't make it work.

k33l0r 15y ago
They use a proprietary authentication mechanism, so you can't just use any XMPP client... The client-to-server authentication used is SASL, with a specific and proprietary mechanism called X_MESSENGER_OAUTH2. ... Which means that all current XMPP clients are NOT able to connect to messenger.live.com. http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/details_on_msns_xmpp_server/ http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/details_on_msns_...

k33l0r 15y ago

Have any third party XMPP clients implemented the proprietary X_MESSENGER_OAUTH2 authentication mechanism yet? Or is there a way to get the authentication to work with existing clients? Is it on the roadmap for Pidgin (or libpidgin) or Adium? I tried doing some quick Googling, but I couldn't find any answers...