7 ms·
The new Google Hangouts will not support XMPP
Hello from Google!
You are the administrator for one or more Google App Engine applications that may be impacted by an upcoming new product release. Google will be releasing a new communications product called Hangouts which users may choose to use instead of Google Talk. The new service does not support XMPP.
As a result XMPP bots such as the App Engine XMPP service will not be able to communicate with users who adopt the new service. There are two ways to keep your App Engine XMPP service working for end users:
1) Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP. XMPP clients will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.
2) End users will be asked to opt-into the new service when it goes live. Note that the go-live date may vary for Google Apps domains. End users and google app domain administrators may choose not to opt into the new system. If they do not opt in they will remain on the current Talk client and there will be no change to their existing functionality, including being able to exchange messages with App Engine XMPP bots. Users who already opted in may toggle back to the old XMPP based chat clients in Gmail.
Note that the changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients, which will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don't hesitate to email us at app-engine-xmpp-questions@googlegroups.com.
Sincerely,
The Google App Engine Team
© 2013 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to Google Cloud Platform or your account.
- bdowney 13y agoYep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!
- mjolk 13y agoSo, what do you propose as a realistic alternative?
- bdowney 13y agoPersonally I'd love to see a community driven extension to XMPP, with its corresponding RFC, which would allow feature parity with Google's proprietary crap while keeping interoperability and federation, so people could give Google the finger on this one.
- hosay123 13y agoI've long dreamed of a resurgence in the open source community, attacking big media much as the community attacked Microsoft in the late 1990s. It's depressing that the PR machine has so thoroughly succeeded that most of those who still call themselves "geeks" now consider building throwaway hacks on big media services cooler and more meaningful than coordinated efforts to replace the services themselves (in the name of serving some ideals much greater than say, amateur entrepreneurialism). Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with. I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.
- mlinksva 13y agoFree-as-in-freedom replacements for many services do exist. By and large nobody knows about them, perhaps because the community isn't unified on the issue like it was against Microsoft, as you point out. I'm not sure privately working toward cloning services is a good way out of this situation. :) autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it. You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.
- 13y ago
- mlinksva 13y agojitsi.org
- stock_toaster 13y agohttp://www.jabber.org/ http://www.jabber.org/ maybe? Or run your own xmpp service, if you are a business/company. I personally use prosody. Works great.
- akohlsmith 13y agoI think that's the entire issue. Those of us with our own xmpp servers can no longer talk to hangouts because we have to have an account with google. s2s is going away, and I really am not interested in creating yet another account on some external system so I can chat with everyone on the non-federated system.
- sharmanaetor 13y ago"both your friends"..I think I might have more than 2 friends :)
- glomph 13y agoThey mean both Google and your friends. :p
- tobico 13y agoSo now Facebook chat, which partially supports XMPP, is the most open of the widely used IM networks. There's a thing.
- tonfa 13y agoHangouts supports xmpp clients (but not federation), so it's similar to facebook afaik.
- X-Istence 13y agoNo, if you have a client connecting to Google's XMPP servers, your messages will not show up if the other user is only logged in on Hangouts. Hangouts ALSO can't send messages to an XMPP only user (even if Google is hosting the talk servers, as is the case for my Google Apps domains).
- mtgx 13y agoLarry Page seemed very upset [1] that Microsoft is basically leeching off their Gtalk contacts into Outlook, without returning the favor (with Skype I assume), and he said he'd prefer if things weren't like this and everyone was more open. He didn't continue that idea, but I think he would've continued it with "...but since nobody wants to do that, then we won't do it anymore either". So they are probably responding in the same way they responded to the leeching of Gmail contacts by Facebook a few years ago, by blocking that API, or in this case replacing the XMPP protocol with a proprietary one. It's too bad it had to come to this, though. [1] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334242/larry-page-to-tech-world-being-negative-is-not-how-we-make-progress http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334242/larry-page-to-tech...
- yanw 13y agoGtalk will still be available though. "... which users may choose to use instead of Google Talk."
- mcintyre1994 13y agoI don't think it's reasonable to expect Google Talk to remain indefinitely though - if you need XMPP you at least want an exit strategy if Hangouts isn't suitable. It's quite telling that the Hangouts app on Android is called "Hangouts (replaces Talk)" and takes Talk's URL in the play store.
- ajpatel 13y agoI need a client for Ubuntu then :(
- yanw 13y agoChrome app: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahadagoaajjgafhacjanaoiihapd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahada...
- manicbovine 13y agoThat extension is essentially broken (running iceWM), as the text input box dips below the taskbar. Furthermore, it requires chrome to be open. I don't necessarily want to keep my browser open at all times, nor do I care to use my browser as a chat client. (Also, what happens if switch to some non-standard browser? There is no way that my choice of browser should impact my ability to chat.) I'm trying to stay open-minded, but so far I really dislike this product. I hope gtalk stays open.
- yanw 13y agoYou can always open a Gmail tab. I think the Chrome app is an excellent cross platform solution (written once, easily maintainable). As for the protocol I don't think it is practical or even possible to built this sort of all encompassing communications platform on top of XMPP (see the competition). I do hope there will be a Hangouts API.
- manicbovine 13y agoI think the chrome app is one aspect of a cross-platform solution. But what if I'd like to chat without opening chrome? I'll cross my fingers for a Hangouts API that allows me to write a standalone client. However, if chatting through a semi-broken browser extension (or memory intensive gmail tab) are my only options, then I guess the service isn't for me. I think the reason I'm annoyed is that I have a lot of important contacts on gtalk, so migrating away will be a challenge. I know change is inevitable, that the service is free, and that they want to offer a better product. Perhaps my use cases are just too expensive to support in the long run.
- kevinwmerritt 13y agoI wonder how long google talk will last in Outlook.com
- yanw 13y agoSerious question: how practical is it to build something like Hangouts that is meant to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber etc on top of XMPP? is it even possible?
- dwdbah 13y agoSure. Much of the Google Talk video stuff was all designed for XMPP; they actively took part in the standardization at times. WhatsApp is XMPP, fundamentally, in any case.
- yanw 13y agoWhy is it not utilized more widely then? foregoing for a minute that everyone is cultivating their own gardens - what are the weaknesses of XMPP that would make it so easily avoidable for most of these apps?
- dorfsmay 13y agoThere are no weaknesses in XMPP. The issue are the protocols on the side, the ones that do video and voice. XMPP allows to chat and create a voice/video session, but: 1) the free protocols to do voice and video are not as good as the proprietary ones 2) it seems that every client use a different set of protocols for video and chat
- andor 13y agoIt's definitely not the lack of features, since XMPP is extendable. I've heard that the protocol is quite chatty and would cause power drain on phones. That could probably be solved with a binary serialization alternative to XML, though.
- tonfa 13y agoIs XMPP asynchronous?
- 13y ago
- drivebyacct2 13y agoThis seemed inevitable. This interface and backend is so inextricably tied to Google+ and Google's new infrastructure. I'm very disappointed. Google's services work well for me, they're well integrated, I love Android, but Android is no longer the bastion of freedom and openness I'd hoped for. I'll be very happy with Google Hangouts but I'm still waiting for the properly federated chat that appeals to the masses.
- takeda64 13y agoWell, the XMPP still works and is decentralized. Is also the biggest network. If that is not enough for you then I'm afraid you won't find any other alternative. You can set up your own XMPP server or use one of tons of the public ones: http://xmpp.net/ http://xmpp.net/ Edit: There's also jabber.org http://www.jabber.org/ http://www.jabber.org/ which probably will operate as long as XMPP is still relevant.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoYeah, I (and tons of people, apparently) misunderstood the changes to XMPP. They are removing the federation however and that does affect interop with their network.
- andybak 13y agoWell done everyone. Instant Messaging is now dead for me because all the people I used to chat with are now fragmented across 4 or 5 different services. Aside from those who gave up on IM for the same reason I now have to. You've all literally killed IM. Well done.
- AceJohnny2 13y agoXMPP/Jabber has the concept of Transports to address this very problem. Sure, you usually get a common denominator of features between the various networks, but presence and chat usually is enough.
- est 13y agoYou mean the transports that spams my buddy list with tons of inactive contacts and duplicates?
- drivebyacct2 13y agoNo dude. I'll just create one more alternative and amass a user based and then ??? and then profit! But I'll have an iOS app and an Android app, so that should cut it right? Fuck feature-phone users, Symbian/BBM/etc. Don't have a browser/desktop app. Whatever. Google Voice is a dying product, and I hate them for what they've done, but at least the underlying transport is SMS and a portable phone number -- if I want I can host it myself in Plivo, which I plan on doing soon.
- barista 13y agoWindows 8 and the windows phone 8 messaging apps bring a bunch of these together very nicely. My usage of IM (which includes SMS and facebook messaging) has gone up significantly ever since I switched.
- clarkm 13y agoIronically, after all this new fragmentation, a few friends and I have decided to move back to IRC. It has all the features we need, we know how to use it, it's not going anywhere, and it's not gonna start changing privacy settings on us.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoI run two user accounts in Chrome during the day: One connected to my personal use the other to Google Apps for Business. I use Chat for Google for both (Adium sucks) About an hour ago, the personal account had a changed icon, started looking nicer, and is now called Hangouts. The Apps for business one stayed the same. I've never been closer to being a fanboi than I was with Google, but this seals it...I'm pissed. Closing off (yet another) service in favor of proprietary protocols is not something a "Don't Be Evil" company does...in fact it's why you have the motto in the first fucking place. You could have made the change without breaking XMPP. This is just shitty all the way around.
- hamax 13y agoYou're wrong on almost every point. "Don't Be Evil" is not Google's motto, XMPP chat still works fine for my hangouts account and no, they couldn't do it without breaking the XMPP. I just hope they'll keep XMPP running for the chat. I'll stop using it the second it'll stop working in bitlbee.
- makomk 13y agoAre messages from your XMPP client going to users of the Hangouts app and vice-versa, though? The e-mail implies that users of Hangouts can still continue to use XMPP clients, but that they're connecting to a totally seperate XMPP-compatible chat system by doing so.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago> no, they couldn't do it without breaking the XMPP. Why not? XMPP is pretty extensible, and Google's Jingle spec was open. Is there a technical reason that Hangouts had to be based on something other than Jabber?
- uniclaude 13y ago> "Don't Be Evil" is not Google's motto Ahem. This[1] is close enough to a motto to make this part of your comment irrelevant. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
- r00fus 13y agoYay, the balkanization of chat. So much for babel/babble. Now you have iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Hangouts, etc. etc. The biggies will be the ones supported by large companies (ie, Skype, iMessage, Hangouts). So when will Amazon buy Viber or another smaller chat community?.
- aspensmonster 13y agoSo... we're back to the 90s? AIM and ICQ and YIM and MSN? I CAN'T WAIT.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoSadly, it means the same tech as in the 90s will win out, because it is TRULY platform independent. SMS. And as much as I hate to say it, iMessage has the best support/transparency for it so far
- makomk 13y agoI think that, at this point, the only Google service that still supports standard, interoperable APIs anymore is Gmail. All the other ones have been discontinued or are in the process of being discontinued. I wonder how long it'll be before Gmail gets closed off.
- gwillen 13y agoSomething interesting is going on here. If you log in to Plus, you can use New Hangouts _right now_. And they _do_ interoperate with XMPP users _right now_ -- I just tried it. So does this mean the rollout is not complete, and what they rolled out as Hangouts today is not what they'll ultimately roll out? Or does it mean -- as I suspect -- that New Hangouts is XMPP under the hood, but they plan to flip the 'interoperate' switch to 'off' once they think nobody will notice?
- Hurdy 13y agoNo, what it means is that 3rd party clients can still interoperate with Hangouts. What does not work is XMPP the way app engine uses it.
- makomk 13y agoAre you sure? From my reading, it's saying the exact opposite - XMPP clients still connect to a seperate XMPP chat service that's compatible with the App Engine XMPP support and completely seperate from Hangouts. The Verge also had a chat with the head of that department and he said that Hangouts drops XMPP support, apparently with no caveats about it still partially supporting XMPP: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4318830/inside-hangouts-googles-big-fix-for-its-messaging-mess http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4318830/inside-hangouts-go...
- secure 13y agoI have heard from somebody else that using XMPP on Hangouts on Plus works. It doesn’t work for me. When I enter an XMPP address, all I get is “send invitation”, but nothing happens when I chose to do that. When sending a message from my XMPP client, it does not show up in Hangouts on Plus.
- X-Istence 13y agoWhen someone sends me a message over XMPP I don't get it in my G+ Hangouts as a received message, and sending a message to an XMPP address in Hangouts asks to send an invite and does nothing. Hangouts CAN NOT communicate with XMPP clients.
- StavrosK 13y agoUgh, and to think that the only thing needed to prevent this was one other "big" IM provider using XMPP. If we didn't have to rely on a single point for everything, and were, instead, more distributed, like email, then Google would have found it much harder to cut federation off.
- liotier 13y ago"Google Talk [..] was based on an old standard that predated the advent of cloud computing" - what an extremely poor justification... He is not even trying to sound credible !
- weems 13y agowoah :(
- subsystem 13y agoOh, how I wish I was a Facebook employee today. Nothing like a good fight when you have the upper hand and the other party is being a jerk.
- ig1 13y agoI'm amazed at people complaining about the fragmentation of IM clients and how it's going to kill instant messaging. IM has never been unified. In the mid-90s you had the war between AIM and ICQ, then came along the IM clients from MSN, Yahoo and Excite. That's what led to the rise of multi-protocol IM clients like Gaim, Jabber and IMVU and out of that rose XMPP (one of 5 major "cross-compatibilty" IM standards). Then you had a new generation of IM wars as desktop clients died out and were replaced by browser chat like GTalk and Facebook Messenger. As the desktop IM clients died, Skype pretty much absorbed their desktop users into their voice chat platform. But now web IM clients are being wiped out by a new generation of mobile IM apps like WhatsApp, Vibber, etc. IM has never been unified, and given it's track record, I doubt that's going to change anytime soon.
- liotier 13y agoXMPP is standardized and works, right now.
- X-Istence 13y agoGtalk and Facebook messenger both used XMPP. XMPP is federated so it allowed many people to easily communicate. Even MSN messenger got on board: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx AIM also has limited XMPP support (although that is just from a quick Google search, can't figure out if that is still the case). Either way more and more clients and chat protocols were beginning to converge onto a single standard, that allowed people to easily communicate across different "domains". That is now going away.
- ig1 13y agoMSN is dead, Microsoft migrated users over to Skype.
- clauretano 13y agoMicrosoft Lync has an XMPP gateway role as well. Unfortunately, Lync Online (Office 365) lacks this ability.
- seany 13y agoAm I the only one that's thinking that "backend" for this is actually whats left of google wave?
- pixelcort 13y agoConsidering that XMPP federation has been turned off for some time now, this really only hurts users using XMPP clients. I was wondering why my friends with non-Google Jabber IDs were never showing up as online, and one day figured out federation was turned off. This is as if a few months ago your email provider silently discarded emails to and from other domains, and just today abandoned SMTP and IMAP. The true failure happened way back when federation was abandoned, not today.
- tuxracer 13y agoFederation was turned off temporarily to fix an exploit then turned back on. I guess it's moot now.
- dwdbah 13y agoRight - there was a lot of noise about federation being turned off, although it never was. 1) Subscription requests to/from other domains were blocked. 2) Only for a short period (about a month, tops).
- zmmmmm 13y agoThis is incredibly confusing. The sentences seem to alternate, between "Your end users will be affected, you must do something" and "Your end users will not be affected". Some of the sentences seem to imply this is isolated to AppEngine ("Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP","the changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients") and others seem to imply that Hangouts is going to completely stop working with XMPP, if not now, very soon. Can anyone clarify if this actually impacts your average standalone XMPP client, not connected with AppEngine, sending and receiving messages to Google Talk users?
- jmillikin 13y agoStandard XMPP clients still work. If you use Pidgin or Adium or other similar clients, you can still send and receive messages to Google users regardless of whether they're using Hangouts. If you have an App Engine instance, and it uses the App Engine XMPP Service[1] to send messages to people, then that will stop working for users who switch to Hangouts. [1] https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp
- fakeer 13y agoWith Google focussing on G+ like crazies(even though I don't know many people who use this service) and seeing Hangout is almost fused in G+, this very much looks like a Google Reader waiting to happen for Google Talk.
- tarkin2 13y agoSo, 1) Competitors use Google's APIs based on open standards for their own advantage. 2) Google gets annoyed. 3) Google stops supporting open standards. Well, that's my honeymoon with Google over. It seems a naive mistake to have assume an enlarging Google would stay true to their roots. It's time for those roots to move. Onwards and upwards.
- tarkin2 13y agoI'm reminded of the story about an angry RMS accosting some devs saying they should be creating their own open APIs rather than using X company's closed API. It turns out Open Source's weird uncle was right again.
- thepacketrat 13y agoThey're still supporting client-to-server XMPP, so third party apps can always just connect as a client rather than doing federation.