16 ms·

Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging

677 points by thisisparker 13y ago

cromwellian 13y ago
As a Googler (who does not work on Hangsout) my own personal opinion is that I fully agree with the EFF here: "In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols." I hope the specs at some point are opened. The Hangouts team probably has good reason at the moment to strictly focus on a core set of functionality and get it working with good UX on all the platforms. People are complaining that stuff like voice calling, and some Talk features are missing, but it's probably due to focus on shipping something that works good first. It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember using reverse engineered Java libraries that could talk to these services. Google Wave was done in the opposite way, as was Open Social. They came with specs, but they did not focus on core user experience in the beginning. It's hard to win with open specs without getting consumer traction.
- deepblueocean 13y ago
  I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol, in which case it's _already_ an open standard. What would be awfully nice is if Google (which is a category mistake - what I really mean is "the Hangouts team") would clarify this, release any updates to the protocol that they've made, and perhaps define something more than the weak API provided for the current Hangouts platform. In particular, the right test of openness is this: can I build an interoperable client that could participate in a Hangout as a first-class entity?
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol I've never heard this. Do you have anything that backs you up? I found a Quora answer that says that the Hangouts API is based on the the Wave API, but that's it.
  - josephg 13y ago
    As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML). That way lies madness.
    - mh- 13y ago
      thank you for giving me a new 'something' to contrast some of our internal transport cruft. i can now, at least, think positively: 'well, at least it's not XML encapsulated in base64-encoded protobufs shipped over XML.'
    - Camillo 13y ago
      How did Wave end up with that sort of mess? Isn't Google full of Very Smart People?
      - zanny 13y ago
        They do love their XML in Android layouts, though @.@
      - DannyBee 13y ago
        The internal architecture of wave was very abstract. a lot of this abstraction was exposed in the first federation spec, somewhat due to necessity, somewhat due to lack of time.
      - rachelbythebay 13y ago
        Here's a thought: what constitutes a very smart person? How often do those occur in the global population? Now, how many people are there on the planet and how big is the company? The Earth may not be big enough for that to work out. This is before you remove people who aren't in this industry, people who are too young or too old to work there, people who don't want to work there, people who DID work there and left, and so on. It might explain a lot, particularly when they go on a hiring bender. Where are all of these new people coming from?
- spankalee 13y ago
  As another Googler, I mostly agree with you, but I also sympathize with the product and engineering teams. They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use. Sure Hangouts could publish their protocol like Wave did, but Wave was a complex mess of different protocol formats and transports and publishing that as a "standard" was way premature. Who knows how good the current Hangout protocols are, or how well they might play with real standards like WebRTC. It's probably too early for them I remain optimistic that these things can be standardized in the future.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    I agree with you, history is pretty much full of committee designed specs that failed, but full of defacto standards from commercially successful products that are later standardized. A lot of the features, like group video calling, first need their use cases polished by user trial, then hopefully, they can be implemented on top of either existing standards, provide inputs to change those standards to satisfy the requirements. OpenID/OAuth is an instructive example. The specs were built very much driven by committee oriented thinking, and the resulting UX implementations out of the gate were much more complicated than the Facebook Connect experience. I think actually focusing on the "design" aspect of how users use it, and then extracting the relevant technical requirements into a spec works better.
  - rjzzleep 13y ago
    i'm sorry i fail to see the argument. it's perfectly fine to have your own proprietary format, but publish the specs so others can interact with it. who said anything about ietf having to sign it off.
    - ChuckMcM 13y ago
      This is exactly right. It is a false choice to suggest that "open" means "slow". But that is fostered in part by folks who think "open" means "community driven." It is perfectly reasonable to publish the specs of what your doing with no commitment of support, simply for folks to see and possibly use at their own risk. That said, the reason companies don't do this is often one or two reasons. Reason one is that it results in a 'noisy' side channel as people who read the specs share their opinions, but they also get bent out of shape if something they said, or think they said, appears in the spec later. The other issue is that there is always a sanitization/prep process to take essentially internal information about a service and create an external representation for consumption (even if that consumption is unsupported). So the 'easy' choice is to not publish.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- saraid216 13y ago
  I have to say I really do admire the way the EFF has taken to presuming that Google is a governmental body.
  - godgod 13y ago
    The EFF is correct. Google is in lock step with the US governments plans of the complete erosion of our privacy rights. Google knows a lot about us all and the feds want that info.
    - pekk 13y ago
      It isn't accurate to state that the US government "plans the complete erosion of our privacy rights".
      - cmiles74 13y ago
        It certainly seems as if it does. They repeatedly pursue strategies to gain access to private data and actively work against compromise or safeguards. If that is too strong, I think everyone has to agree that shoring up privacy rights is something they are clearly hindering.
    - moultano 13y ago
      Poe's law.
  - kps 13y ago
    Where does the article conflate Google with a governmental body?
    - mwfunk 13y ago
      With the implicit assumption that there is any expectation or obligation for Google to conform to some level of openness, especially in (relatively) new products, as if it were paid for with taxpayer money and they owe us something in return. We can say that we wish it were more open, or that we won't use it because it isn't open, but I don't understand the attitude that they are committing some colossal ethical lapse or failing some social contract by not having it be more open at this stage.
- zmanian 13y ago
  It always seems to be my look Google is heading in the direction of a WebRTC based messaging service/client and then suddenly the product group veers off into another direction. WebRTC has been nearly here for several years now but it does seem to arrive...
- graue 13y ago
  > It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype, and to this day you can only call a Skype-using friend/colleague if you use the official, closed-source Skype client. So let's not be sanguine.
  - fryguy 13y ago
    or the closed-source plugin with an API (skypekit.exe)
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      I was so hopeful they would release that at a library so all the open-source IM clients could link to it and get Skype integration. They indicated, years ago, that it was going to be released, but as far as I know, you can still only get it via a developer account.
  - josteink 13y ago
    I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype It was done, but Skype has a rule about this which they apply quickly: Press the cease and desist button. I've been using IM clients with support for skype, only to see it get dropped. Which makes it doubleplus sad that MSN (which was fairly interoptable) got ditched for Skype and not the other way around. The only "supported" way for third party IM clients to access Skype's network without risk of lawsuits is piggybacking on its COM API and have the user download and log into the official client, and have that handle all the actual communication. You probably think "He's gotta be kidding", but sadly I'm not. TLDR: Skype does not only not care for or provide an open-source implementation, but they are actively fighting it.
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  > ... necessitated by new technical demands As a bystander, this comes across as "we aren't smart enough to figure it out", or "we are smart enough, but this is a business decision with ulterior ("evil") motives". Neither of those look positive for Google. I don't expect multi-person video conferences to work, but plain old textual messages, as already work today, shouldn't be a problem.
  - aneth4 13y ago
    Wanting to maintain a competitive advantage is not evil in and of itself. Google Hangouts is far from a monopoly and they are under no obligation to make every product completely open. Not only would it be competitively stupid, but it would also hinder product development to be so heavily tied to standards publication.
    - rogerbinns 13y ago
      Google has a marketing approach of being different by not being "evil", being open & accessible, and having smart people work there. The steady drumbeat now is one of being no different than the other guys. Google held themselves up as taking the high road, which is why so many are calling them out on this (and why people don't call out other companies for the same antics). The issue isn't even about making hangouts open, but rather about chat messages in hangouts also being able to relay with federated XMPP servers - something GTalk does today just fine and has done so for many years.
- pyre 13y ago
  | It's inevitable people will reverse | engineer the client, as was done with MSN, | Y! Messenger, and AOL That's not the end-all be-all though. I remember that AOL was pretty aggressive about keeping unauthorized clients off of their Oscar protocol (the original protocol was 'toc,' IIRC and didn't support all of the 'advanced' features like Buddy Icons, idle times, etc). At one point, AOL's servers would require random chunks of the official AOL IM client's binary as a protection measure. Obviously you can get around this, but it's not something you can do out in the open (distributing AOL IM with, say, Pidgin/libpurple would be copyright infringement).
- DannyBee 13y ago
  Google Wave was not really done in the opposite way when it came to specs. The spec were largely written by an an intern and a person not part of the wave team helping wave with other things. Everyone else was focused on Wave.
- groovy2shoes 13y ago
  As an Android user, the new Hangouts app that replaced the Talk app feels like one step forward and four steps back (in terms of UX). The one step forward is that the chat windows look prettier. The four steps back, from most annoying to least annoying: 1) Chat windows give me no indication of the presence of the other participant(s) in a conversation. If they sign off, I have no idea they've signed off. They frequently get messages from the tail end of a conversation much later, which is confusing for them. 2) The contact list is in alphabetical order, regardless of their presence. Talk used to separate online contacts from offline ones. This was nice because I have a lot of contacts in my gmail account, and only a dozen or so ever sign in to chat. There's no obvious way to change the sort in Hangouts. 3) The UI is higher latency. If I touch a notification in my tray, I often have to wait upwards of two seconds for the Hangouts app to load. The various screens within the app also take longer to load. 4) I used to have a custom notification set when I received a message. Hangouts replaced it with its own and there's no obvious way to change it back. I hadn't noticed Hangouts had abandoned XMPP. I find this rather unfortunate. Adium on my Mac still connects fine, but for how long?
mindcrime 13y ago
Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Indeed. If basic XMPP wasn't good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or whatever other protocol already exists) then the "right thing to do" would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was. OR, as a secondary option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol, along with an open source reference implementation. Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort. You can't just take Google services engineered for Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it's not a matter of just code dumping. Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android, iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with spec document is probably the least priority.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    True, but I still think they should commit to doing it eventually. Even if they just came out today and said "We'll have an OSS reference implementation and detailed spec available within 6 months" I think most people would be OK with that (as long as they followed through). But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool.
    - RivieraKid 13y ago
      > But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool. Well, what financial incentive does Google have for creating a completely open and free communication standard?
mosqutip 13y ago
This is quite sad, and what seems to be a growing trend at Google.
- godgod 13y ago
  I've noticed this trend as well. Privacy is dead at Google. Sleep with dogs(US govt), don't get upset when you wake up with fleas.
orangethirty 13y ago
The bigger issue here is that Google is integrating everything into G+. They are moving away from being a search engine, towards being a social network with better search capabilities than Facebook. The problem is that the average Google users (read, non hacker, and generally not computer smart) does not understand the changes. They just go to Google to learn about a new chicken recipe, or what side-effects does Singulair has. They don't go there to socialize. And Google is forcing this into everybody. Which is a significant deal, because for a lot of people out there ( a lot) Google is the internet. Just like AOL was in the 90's, Google is now. They are diluting their brand, and going in every direction. Before you say anything else, I use google products. I like Google. I remember their old nerdy logo. I loved how they took on the old search engines of yore, and beat them at their own game. But it has reached a point where Google is now a faceless corporation simply driven to profit. All of their actions point to that. They seem to no longer really care about the users. Just like IBM, MS, and all the old tech giants. Management has taken over. The true hacker spirit seems to not be found anymore.
- angryasian 13y ago
  I disagree with their mobile efforts they need to start unifying all these disjointed services, like they did with hangouts. It makes sense to associate your google accounts with your google mobile account along with your data storage as well.
  - orangethirty 13y ago
    I have little issue with that. Though the problem is how they handle it. If you, for any reason (read: error on the part) get your account suspended, then you are royally fucked. You loose all of your data, across all services. What good does that do? But if I had a separate account for each one (with the same login credentials), then I would not be locked way from my data. If I have an issue with Gmail, then Drive would still be available. But no, they wont have that.
    - magicalist 13y ago
      Does any company do that? I can't think of any that do that for e.g. Terms of Service violations (as opposed to just going over a quota or something), even accounting for false positives. It sounds like you really just need to diversify the providers of the services you use.
jspark 13y ago
Does facebook follow an open standard for their messaging system?
- zokier 13y ago
  Facebook chat is XMPP, yes, if that's what you are asking.
- dannyr 13y ago
  Also add WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, Kik. Google is getting clobbered in the messaging space by these apps. If Google thinks they can move faster by dropping XMPP support, I'm fine with it. Imagine if Google sticks with XMPP and continue to lose market share in messaging. They might have to shut down Talk. We know what happens when Google sunsets a product, lots of angry people. Lose-lose situation for Google here.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- saraid216 13y ago
  Sort of? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/
- mindcrime 13y ago
  It's XMPP at core, but - AFAIK - they also do not support server-to-server federation. So you can connect to Facebook chat with any XMPP compatible client, but if you run your own ejabberd server, you can't connect to your server, and then message your Facebook friends.
  - hwatson 13y ago
    It's not. As https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ explains, "Facebook Chat should be compatible with every XMPP client, but is not a full XMPP server. It should be thought of as a proxy into the world of Facebook Chat on www.facebook.com.
peterwaller 13y ago
Larry inspired me with his talk the other week, in which he lamented that Microsoft (and others) were playing silly zero-sum games in their own closed ecosystems. I've immediately stopped using as many Google products as I can in response to this after trying out the new hangouts a few days ago and finding I couldn't connect with my friends that weren't on Google. I'm sad - this directly removes choice and is a sort of lockin. I now can't use Google to communicate with people who choose not to participate in Google's ecosystem for whatever reason. By leaving, I also make it harder to communicate with many friends who are on Google. Google, you've alienated me.
mtgx 13y ago
I'm a lot more interested in them adding OTR encryption than having interoperability. However, if they never intend to add OTR (which being Google, seems very likely), then I'd want Hangouts to at least work with other IM's that do offer OTR, like Gtalk has worked so far.
- cbr 13y ago
  Is this out of date: https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291 https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291
  - archivator 13y ago
    The option is still there on a chat-per-chat basis but they removed the "Turn history off by default" setting. Edit: Actually, I don't know that "turn history off" does the same thing as that option, they just seem the same.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    That's just turning off chat history, which is confusingly also referred to as "off the record". Usually when people talk about OTR for chat, they mean client-to-client encryption, so not even the chat provider knows what the content of the chats were, analogous to using something like PGP for email.
- magicalist 13y ago
  OTR is important, but I don't think you really want your chat provider also providing the OTR implementation. Better to use a third-party client. Preferably open source. Doing it browser-based also seems problematic, for all the usual javascript/encryption reasons. I've never heard of people using it in regular Gtalk, though. How does that work? Browser extension? I've only ever seen things like using Pidgin with OTR, which should still work as long as you have a Google account (aka you don't need XMPP federation to talk to people on google's network).
- newman314 13y ago
  Gtalk's OTR is not real. http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2013/01/how-to-do-encrypted-off-the-record-instant-messenger-with-pidgin-2477082.html http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2013/01/how-to-do-encry...
shmerl 13y ago
Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Well said. Google made a bad move with breaking things before enabling interoperability by publishing their protocol. It's not the proper way of doing things. Firstly, they could extend XMPP, Jingle etc. instead of creating something from scratch. If they can't (though they didn't explain why), they need first to develop a protocol, publish it, and then start deploying it. Not other way around! Right now they are moving towards cutting the connection between Google users and users of other XMPP servers. Connection which works already now. I can understand that they might envision new communication patterns, but it doesn't mean one has to break what already works before enabling others to interoperate. It's completely immature on Google's part. Going the right way might take more time - but it will not increase the horrible mess that the IM scene is today. What Google does now is creating only more mess.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
godgod 13y ago
Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.
- pjscott 13y ago
  What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads next to the search results.
  - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    The same motive. This isn't even a secret conspiracy, their ToS says they do it and says that is why they do it. The more data they have on you, the more ad money they make. Why do you think the ads you see in a search just happen to contain items you were just emailing your mother about a day prior?
- flipcoder 13y ago
  Conspiracy or not, Google products fit the definition of spyware.
  - Shank 13y ago
    So order takeout (http://google.com/takeout http://google.com/takeout) and leave (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en). It really bugs me to see people claiming "Google is in bed with the US government," but fail to acknowledge the transparency report: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/ Or how about when Google gave a range of NSLs they received? Does Microsoft do this?
    - zero_intp 13y ago
      you offer a false dichotomy. All individuals who seek to silence others with a take-it-or-leave-it are people who do not want to suffer the mental dissonance of being frustrated with a provider they themselves use.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
That's one reason to dislike Google. They push free (as in beer) services and standards until they kill all competitors, then let it rot. To me what they do is even worse than going with proprietary solutions from the start and charging for it, at least that's honest and fosters competition. Just look at what they did with Google Apps. Nowadays I only trust services where they profit (aka. anything that includes advertising), and none of the open standards they push forward.
- creativityland 13y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself.
- magicalist 13y ago
  Except this is just generic Google comment #4 and has nothing to do with the current situation. AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP. Google Apps doesn't seem especially relevant, but it also has lots of competitors (including, just like chat, very active open source projects), hasn't been left to rot, and they've actually moved to only charging for it, instead of having an ad-supported version. ...so, are you really just talking about Reader?
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    > AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP. That's not how I see it at all. You make it look like they are improving the service and that requires breaking compatibility with XMPP, but it's yet another strategy to force users into Google+ by consolidating Google Talk under the "Hangouts" feature. Commitment to open standards is only skin deep.
    - magicalist 13y ago
MrQuincle 13y ago
It's just a matter of time before something like Vidyo [1] is replaced by WebRTC. There is too much at stake for Google to be the kitchen sink for all kind of technologies. They want you to connect to them. [1] http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/ http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/
zachgersh 13y ago
It's a defensive posture in response to what Apple has been doing with iMessage.
RivieraKid 13y ago
It's often not in the best interest of private companies to use open standards. If using an open standard is a net financial loss, why should the company do that? It's simply the result of how the system works. I've been thinking whether the rules (=laws) can be changed somehow to provide incentive for using open standards, but it's quite a complicated problem.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Instead of adding more rules with their inevitable unintended consequences, I'd rather we'd kill the rules that promote closed protocols, like the anti-reverse-engineering clauses and overreaching "anti-hacking" laws.
ausjke 13y ago
'dont be evil'
- ausjke 13y ago
  by down-voting this is getting even more evil, I don't mind what google does, just please don't wear a 'dont be evil' outfit while doing it, you can't have it both ways, why bother.
  - runjake 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure you're being downvoted because your comment didn't add any value to the conversation. Beyond that, we see a "don't be evil" comment every time a Google-related post comes along.
    - ausjke 13y ago
      I hope we can have a google competitor on the horizon, it does not matter what google claims, once it starts to monopoly, it starts to get evil, i.e. forget about the interoperability, forget the open source, my way is the best,etc. google is becoming microsoft quickly under the new CEO, like many others, I'm finding alternatives for all related google services, I'm ok with that actually, just find its 'dont be evil' slogan becomes even more so ridiculous.
      - runjake 13y ago
        Entropy, my friend. Nothing lasts forever. The question is, is there a suitable replacement?
      - greiskul 13y ago
        Google doesn't have a monopoly in instant messaging. Far from it, they are lagging behind Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. What good is Google doing for the world having an open product that almost nobody uses?
tptacek 13y ago
I am not clear why EFF is lobbying on behalf of the XMPP standards foundation here. The entire computing industry is cluttered with opportunities for interoperable standards, some of which haven't been tried, some of which worked out, and some of which were attempted but (often correctly) jettisoned in favor of progress. Standardization is a good thing, but not the only good thing, and it always worries me when people make arguments that effectively demand that new offerings justify themselves (either with time or money) to existing standards groups.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  Am I misunderstanding, or does your last paragraph rule out social pressure as a force for standardization? Are you proposing that we simply allow standards to evolve according to the local incentives of individual agents?
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Sometimes. Standards bodies are not themselves entirely benign. They're extremely susceptible to capture, and the incentives of those people not in service of some commercial agenda are often not aligned with users either. People sometimes lose sight of the real goal, which is interoperability. Interoperability is harmed not just by deliberately idiosyncratic implementations of old ideas, but by refusal to adapt to new ones.
    - userulluipeste 13y ago
      Is SPDY and Microsoft's objections to it being implemented as HTTP 2.0 somehow serve as example to your expressed view?
- ralphm 13y ago
  This isn't so much about XMPP. Dropping federation, without notice to cross-boundary contacts, is the bigger thing for me. I am personally disappointed about the whole affair, especially because there is still no clear picture on why that would be necessary. As an XMPP Council member I can say that general consensus within the XMPP Standards Foundation is that we will just move forward, no longer constrained by things, like network security, Google never got around to implement.
djloche 13y ago
Google isn't abandoning open standards for instant messaging. They're abandoning instant messaging. They've moved from a real time communications tool to a messaging tool. This is incredibly frustrating for those who used previously used Google Talk for instant messaging purposes, but now have to look for other options outside the Google ecosystem.
swiil 13y ago
I switched back.
tn13 13y ago
Actually makes total sense. Companies like Google should always remain ahead of the curve. They should innovate much faster than any of the open standards could grow.
- claudius 13y ago
  They can use XMPP as a base and build extensions for everything they need atop of that, then use these extensions immediately while they go through the XSF and eventually become a standard. XMPP has sort of been designed with extensibility and innovation in mind.
yeleti 13y ago
We abandoned xmpp for node.js and websockets at www.tesla.im
nwmcsween 13y ago
Thank god XMPP is disgusting.
guest 13y ago
Internet abandons Google, heads back to the glory days of Prodigy and Compuserv. Sales of animated gif skyrocket, solving financial crisis.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
The sad thing is, no one has noticed that Hangouts is invoking a WebRTC plugin in my PulseAudio container, leading me to believe that they're already experimenting with WebRTC. With WebRTC, a proper signaling protocol (they're probably using Jingle anyway, give the RTC history and the fact that RTC relies and builds on Jingle), and a relay server, there's not much to need to do to interoperate if they wanted to enable it. This whole notion that they "can't" make it interoperable or that it will "slow them down", is complete and utter shit. Slow them down on what? All I've seen so far is more merging of GoogleTalk+GooglePlus and a rebranding effort. Basically no new feature, no integration with Google Voice, no seamless integration with SMS.
eunice 13y ago
IMAP in gmail next
- rnicholson 13y ago
  got a source? Or just wildly speculating?
  - farinasa 13y ago
    They killed calDAV. IMAP is a bit of a jump, but mark my words, cardDAV will be next.
josteink 13y ago
Google abandoning open standards is nothing new. It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in a heartbeat and exploit that. Just look at what they did to the open web with Chrome. First they said "Web standards are important, so here is a good, fast and web-standards compliant browser. Feel free to try it". After a while that was not enough, and on every single web-page they had they had a big "Use Chrome!" ad for every visitor not using it already. Once they had gained enough dominance, suddenly Google started using non-W3C HTML in their production web-sites. HTML which had not been fully drafted or ratified and which was only available as they saw fit in web-kit. And then all the other non-Google browsers were suddenly "slow" on "adopting new HTML standards". Basically through its internet dominance, and now its browser, Google pushed through its own implementation of proprietary HTML features as standards other browsers had to implement, without any discussion, feedback or other input. Google just decided that they alone should dictate how the HTML-standard is from now on. After seeing that happen, I lost all belief in Google as a company which I will rely on for anything more than I strictly need to.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  This is not the case at all, though. WHATWG is a good example of several browser makers cooperating. The only thing entirely Chrome-only is NaCl and it's not exposed to web pages (just extensions).
- Kequc 13y ago
  Are you from the future? Because Chrome is leaving webkit in the coming weeks but they still haven't yet. Chrome uses the full set of W3C standards in use though webkit and not any custom version of it. http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4186302/google-chrome-blink-coming-to-chrome-28-in-10-weeks http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4186302/google-chrome-blink...
- StavrosK 13y ago
  > It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them To be fair, how did XMPP serve them? They weren't really benefitting from it, they did it mostly for the good of the community.
plywoodtrees 13y ago
I would also like an open standard but I had to laugh at the final sentence of the EFF statement: > To be clear, even the earlier [off-the-record] setting was far from perfect from a privacy perspective: disabling chat history only kept the logged messages out of your Gmail account, and didn't prevent other users, or Google itself, from keeping a record of the conversation. How on earth would you expect an open protocol to prevent the other keeping a record of a conversation? It's like asking for perfect DRM with open clients.
- claudius 13y ago
  They could[0] implement some client side actual OTR[1], at least blocking Google from keeping the clear-text message. No idea how they would want to force the intended recipient of the message not to store it, though. [0] In theory with infinite resources and time. Maybe. [1] Or any other sort of encryption.
fakeer 13y ago
Time for email, im, calendar, tasks, notes, docs and other services start-ups (for individual users). Better if they are decentralized. You wouldn't have to move everything at once. But this will also increase costs.
farinasa 13y ago
Google has dropped support for XMPP (chat) and calDAV (calendar syncing). What's next? cardDAV? IMAP?? Honestly I can see that Google is no longer interested in open protocols. They are afraid that it's too easy for their users to simply migrate everything away. Their response is to build a wall around their users. Enough red flags have been raised for me to, unfortunately, say goodbye. Perhaps I may still buy their hardware, but they want to isolate my data from every company but them. They are no longer reliable.
acd 13y ago
The Google mantra "Don't be evil" - not! Decision to drop XMPP is bad/evil. Seems more like the strategy of customer lock in.

677 points by thisisparker 13y ago

As a Googler (who does not work on Hangsout) my own personal opinion is that I fully agree with the EFF here: "In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols." I hope the specs at some point are opened. The Hangouts team probably has good reason at the moment to strictly focus on a core set of functionality and get it working with good UX on all the platforms. People are complaining that stuff like voice calling, and some Talk features are missing, but it's probably due to focus on shipping something that works good first. It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember using reverse engineered Java libraries that could talk to these services. Google Wave was done in the opposite way, as was Open Social. They came with specs, but they did not focus on core user experience in the beginning. It's hard to win with open specs without getting consumer traction.

deepblueocean 13y ago
I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol, in which case it's _already_ an open standard. What would be awfully nice is if Google (which is a category mistake - what I really mean is "the Hangouts team") would clarify this, release any updates to the protocol that they've made, and perhaps define something more than the weak API provided for the current Hangouts platform. In particular, the right test of openness is this: can I build an interoperable client that could participate in a Hangout as a first-class entity?
- saraid216 13y ago
  > I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol I've never heard this. Do you have anything that backs you up? I found a Quora answer that says that the Hangouts API is based on the the Wave API, but that's it.
- josephg 13y ago
  As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML). That way lies madness.
  - mh- 13y ago
    thank you for giving me a new 'something' to contrast some of our internal transport cruft. i can now, at least, think positively: 'well, at least it's not XML encapsulated in base64-encoded protobufs shipped over XML.'
  - Camillo 13y ago
    How did Wave end up with that sort of mess? Isn't Google full of Very Smart People?
    - zanny 13y ago
      They do love their XML in Android layouts, though @.@
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      The internal architecture of wave was very abstract. a lot of this abstraction was exposed in the first federation spec, somewhat due to necessity, somewhat due to lack of time.
    - rachelbythebay 13y ago
      Here's a thought: what constitutes a very smart person? How often do those occur in the global population? Now, how many people are there on the planet and how big is the company? The Earth may not be big enough for that to work out. This is before you remove people who aren't in this industry, people who are too young or too old to work there, people who don't want to work there, people who DID work there and left, and so on. It might explain a lot, particularly when they go on a hiring bender. Where are all of these new people coming from?
spankalee 13y ago
As another Googler, I mostly agree with you, but I also sympathize with the product and engineering teams. They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use. Sure Hangouts could publish their protocol like Wave did, but Wave was a complex mess of different protocol formats and transports and publishing that as a "standard" was way premature. Who knows how good the current Hangout protocols are, or how well they might play with real standards like WebRTC. It's probably too early for them I remain optimistic that these things can be standardized in the future.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  I agree with you, history is pretty much full of committee designed specs that failed, but full of defacto standards from commercially successful products that are later standardized. A lot of the features, like group video calling, first need their use cases polished by user trial, then hopefully, they can be implemented on top of either existing standards, provide inputs to change those standards to satisfy the requirements. OpenID/OAuth is an instructive example. The specs were built very much driven by committee oriented thinking, and the resulting UX implementations out of the gate were much more complicated than the Facebook Connect experience. I think actually focusing on the "design" aspect of how users use it, and then extracting the relevant technical requirements into a spec works better.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  i'm sorry i fail to see the argument. it's perfectly fine to have your own proprietary format, but publish the specs so others can interact with it. who said anything about ietf having to sign it off.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    This is exactly right. It is a false choice to suggest that "open" means "slow". But that is fostered in part by folks who think "open" means "community driven." It is perfectly reasonable to publish the specs of what your doing with no commitment of support, simply for folks to see and possibly use at their own risk. That said, the reason companies don't do this is often one or two reasons. Reason one is that it results in a 'noisy' side channel as people who read the specs share their opinions, but they also get bent out of shape if something they said, or think they said, appears in the spec later. The other issue is that there is always a sanitization/prep process to take essentially internal information about a service and create an external representation for consumption (even if that consumption is unsupported). So the 'easy' choice is to not publish.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
saraid216 13y ago
I have to say I really do admire the way the EFF has taken to presuming that Google is a governmental body.
- godgod 13y ago
  The EFF is correct. Google is in lock step with the US governments plans of the complete erosion of our privacy rights. Google knows a lot about us all and the feds want that info.
  - pekk 13y ago
    It isn't accurate to state that the US government "plans the complete erosion of our privacy rights".
    - cmiles74 13y ago
      It certainly seems as if it does. They repeatedly pursue strategies to gain access to private data and actively work against compromise or safeguards. If that is too strong, I think everyone has to agree that shoring up privacy rights is something they are clearly hindering.
  - moultano 13y ago
    Poe's law.
- kps 13y ago
  Where does the article conflate Google with a governmental body?
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    With the implicit assumption that there is any expectation or obligation for Google to conform to some level of openness, especially in (relatively) new products, as if it were paid for with taxpayer money and they owe us something in return. We can say that we wish it were more open, or that we won't use it because it isn't open, but I don't understand the attitude that they are committing some colossal ethical lapse or failing some social contract by not having it be more open at this stage.
zmanian 13y ago
It always seems to be my look Google is heading in the direction of a WebRTC based messaging service/client and then suddenly the product group veers off into another direction. WebRTC has been nearly here for several years now but it does seem to arrive...
graue 13y ago
> It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype, and to this day you can only call a Skype-using friend/colleague if you use the official, closed-source Skype client. So let's not be sanguine.
- fryguy 13y ago
  or the closed-source plugin with an API (skypekit.exe)
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    I was so hopeful they would release that at a library so all the open-source IM clients could link to it and get Skype integration. They indicated, years ago, that it was going to be released, but as far as I know, you can still only get it via a developer account.
- josteink 13y ago
  I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype It was done, but Skype has a rule about this which they apply quickly: Press the cease and desist button. I've been using IM clients with support for skype, only to see it get dropped. Which makes it doubleplus sad that MSN (which was fairly interoptable) got ditched for Skype and not the other way around. The only "supported" way for third party IM clients to access Skype's network without risk of lawsuits is piggybacking on its COM API and have the user download and log into the official client, and have that handle all the actual communication. You probably think "He's gotta be kidding", but sadly I'm not. TLDR: Skype does not only not care for or provide an open-source implementation, but they are actively fighting it.
rogerbinns 13y ago
> ... necessitated by new technical demands As a bystander, this comes across as "we aren't smart enough to figure it out", or "we are smart enough, but this is a business decision with ulterior ("evil") motives". Neither of those look positive for Google. I don't expect multi-person video conferences to work, but plain old textual messages, as already work today, shouldn't be a problem.
- aneth4 13y ago
  Wanting to maintain a competitive advantage is not evil in and of itself. Google Hangouts is far from a monopoly and they are under no obligation to make every product completely open. Not only would it be competitively stupid, but it would also hinder product development to be so heavily tied to standards publication.
  - rogerbinns 13y ago
    Google has a marketing approach of being different by not being "evil", being open & accessible, and having smart people work there. The steady drumbeat now is one of being no different than the other guys. Google held themselves up as taking the high road, which is why so many are calling them out on this (and why people don't call out other companies for the same antics). The issue isn't even about making hangouts open, but rather about chat messages in hangouts also being able to relay with federated XMPP servers - something GTalk does today just fine and has done so for many years.
pyre 13y ago
| It's inevitable people will reverse | engineer the client, as was done with MSN, | Y! Messenger, and AOL That's not the end-all be-all though. I remember that AOL was pretty aggressive about keeping unauthorized clients off of their Oscar protocol (the original protocol was 'toc,' IIRC and didn't support all of the 'advanced' features like Buddy Icons, idle times, etc). At one point, AOL's servers would require random chunks of the official AOL IM client's binary as a protection measure. Obviously you can get around this, but it's not something you can do out in the open (distributing AOL IM with, say, Pidgin/libpurple would be copyright infringement).
DannyBee 13y ago
Google Wave was not really done in the opposite way when it came to specs. The spec were largely written by an an intern and a person not part of the wave team helping wave with other things. Everyone else was focused on Wave.
groovy2shoes 13y ago
As an Android user, the new Hangouts app that replaced the Talk app feels like one step forward and four steps back (in terms of UX). The one step forward is that the chat windows look prettier. The four steps back, from most annoying to least annoying: 1) Chat windows give me no indication of the presence of the other participant(s) in a conversation. If they sign off, I have no idea they've signed off. They frequently get messages from the tail end of a conversation much later, which is confusing for them. 2) The contact list is in alphabetical order, regardless of their presence. Talk used to separate online contacts from offline ones. This was nice because I have a lot of contacts in my gmail account, and only a dozen or so ever sign in to chat. There's no obvious way to change the sort in Hangouts. 3) The UI is higher latency. If I touch a notification in my tray, I often have to wait upwards of two seconds for the Hangouts app to load. The various screens within the app also take longer to load. 4) I used to have a custom notification set when I received a message. Hangouts replaced it with its own and there's no obvious way to change it back. I hadn't noticed Hangouts had abandoned XMPP. I find this rather unfortunate. Adium on my Mac still connects fine, but for how long?

mindcrime 13y ago

Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Indeed. If basic XMPP wasn't good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or whatever other protocol already exists) then the "right thing to do" would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was. OR, as a secondary option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol, along with an open source reference implementation. Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.

cromwellian 13y ago
To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort. You can't just take Google services engineered for Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it's not a matter of just code dumping. Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android, iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with spec document is probably the least priority.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  True, but I still think they should commit to doing it eventually. Even if they just came out today and said "We'll have an OSS reference implementation and detailed spec available within 6 months" I think most people would be OK with that (as long as they followed through). But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool.
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    > But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool. Well, what financial incentive does Google have for creating a completely open and free communication standard?

mosqutip 13y ago

This is quite sad, and what seems to be a growing trend at Google.

godgod 13y ago
I've noticed this trend as well. Privacy is dead at Google. Sleep with dogs(US govt), don't get upset when you wake up with fleas.

orangethirty 13y ago

The bigger issue here is that Google is integrating everything into G+. They are moving away from being a search engine, towards being a social network with better search capabilities than Facebook. The problem is that the average Google users (read, non hacker, and generally not computer smart) does not understand the changes. They just go to Google to learn about a new chicken recipe, or what side-effects does Singulair has. They don't go there to socialize. And Google is forcing this into everybody. Which is a significant deal, because for a lot of people out there ( a lot) Google is the internet. Just like AOL was in the 90's, Google is now. They are diluting their brand, and going in every direction. Before you say anything else, I use google products. I like Google. I remember their old nerdy logo. I loved how they took on the old search engines of yore, and beat them at their own game. But it has reached a point where Google is now a faceless corporation simply driven to profit. All of their actions point to that. They seem to no longer really care about the users. Just like IBM, MS, and all the old tech giants. Management has taken over. The true hacker spirit seems to not be found anymore.

angryasian 13y ago
I disagree with their mobile efforts they need to start unifying all these disjointed services, like they did with hangouts. It makes sense to associate your google accounts with your google mobile account along with your data storage as well.
- orangethirty 13y ago
  I have little issue with that. Though the problem is how they handle it. If you, for any reason (read: error on the part) get your account suspended, then you are royally fucked. You loose all of your data, across all services. What good does that do? But if I had a separate account for each one (with the same login credentials), then I would not be locked way from my data. If I have an issue with Gmail, then Drive would still be available. But no, they wont have that.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    Does any company do that? I can't think of any that do that for e.g. Terms of Service violations (as opposed to just going over a quota or something), even accounting for false positives. It sounds like you really just need to diversify the providers of the services you use.

jspark 13y ago

Does facebook follow an open standard for their messaging system?

zokier 13y ago
Facebook chat is XMPP, yes, if that's what you are asking.
dannyr 13y ago
Also add WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, Kik. Google is getting clobbered in the messaging space by these apps. If Google thinks they can move faster by dropping XMPP support, I'm fine with it. Imagine if Google sticks with XMPP and continue to lose market share in messaging. They might have to shut down Talk. We know what happens when Google sunsets a product, lots of angry people. Lose-lose situation for Google here.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
saraid216 13y ago
Sort of? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/
mindcrime 13y ago
It's XMPP at core, but - AFAIK - they also do not support server-to-server federation. So you can connect to Facebook chat with any XMPP compatible client, but if you run your own ejabberd server, you can't connect to your server, and then message your Facebook friends.
- hwatson 13y ago
  It's not. As https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ explains, "Facebook Chat should be compatible with every XMPP client, but is not a full XMPP server. It should be thought of as a proxy into the world of Facebook Chat on www.facebook.com.

peterwaller 13y ago

Larry inspired me with his talk the other week, in which he lamented that Microsoft (and others) were playing silly zero-sum games in their own closed ecosystems. I've immediately stopped using as many Google products as I can in response to this after trying out the new hangouts a few days ago and finding I couldn't connect with my friends that weren't on Google. I'm sad - this directly removes choice and is a sort of lockin. I now can't use Google to communicate with people who choose not to participate in Google's ecosystem for whatever reason. By leaving, I also make it harder to communicate with many friends who are on Google. Google, you've alienated me.

mtgx 13y ago

I'm a lot more interested in them adding OTR encryption than having interoperability. However, if they never intend to add OTR (which being Google, seems very likely), then I'd want Hangouts to at least work with other IM's that do offer OTR, like Gtalk has worked so far.

cbr 13y ago
Is this out of date: https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291 https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291
- archivator 13y ago
  The option is still there on a chat-per-chat basis but they removed the "Turn history off by default" setting. Edit: Actually, I don't know that "turn history off" does the same thing as that option, they just seem the same.
- magicalist 13y ago
  That's just turning off chat history, which is confusingly also referred to as "off the record". Usually when people talk about OTR for chat, they mean client-to-client encryption, so not even the chat provider knows what the content of the chats were, analogous to using something like PGP for email.
magicalist 13y ago
OTR is important, but I don't think you really want your chat provider also providing the OTR implementation. Better to use a third-party client. Preferably open source. Doing it browser-based also seems problematic, for all the usual javascript/encryption reasons. I've never heard of people using it in regular Gtalk, though. How does that work? Browser extension? I've only ever seen things like using Pidgin with OTR, which should still work as long as you have a Google account (aka you don't need XMPP federation to talk to people on google's network).
newman314 13y ago
Gtalk's OTR is not real. http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2013/01/how-to-do-encrypted-off-the-record-instant-messenger-with-pidgin-2477082.html http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2013/01/how-to-do-encry...

shmerl 13y ago

Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Well said. Google made a bad move with breaking things before enabling interoperability by publishing their protocol. It's not the proper way of doing things. Firstly, they could extend XMPP, Jingle etc. instead of creating something from scratch. If they can't (though they didn't explain why), they need first to develop a protocol, publish it, and then start deploying it. Not other way around! Right now they are moving towards cutting the connection between Google users and users of other XMPP servers. Connection which works already now. I can understand that they might envision new communication patterns, but it doesn't mean one has to break what already works before enabling others to interoperate. It's completely immature on Google's part. Going the right way might take more time - but it will not increase the horrible mess that the IM scene is today. What Google does now is creating only more mess.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

godgod 13y ago

Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.

pjscott 13y ago
What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads next to the search results.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  The same motive. This isn't even a secret conspiracy, their ToS says they do it and says that is why they do it. The more data they have on you, the more ad money they make. Why do you think the ads you see in a search just happen to contain items you were just emailing your mother about a day prior?
flipcoder 13y ago
Conspiracy or not, Google products fit the definition of spyware.
- Shank 13y ago
  So order takeout (http://google.com/takeout http://google.com/takeout) and leave (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en). It really bugs me to see people claiming "Google is in bed with the US government," but fail to acknowledge the transparency report: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/ Or how about when Google gave a range of NSLs they received? Does Microsoft do this?
  - zero_intp 13y ago
    you offer a false dichotomy. All individuals who seek to silence others with a take-it-or-leave-it are people who do not want to suffer the mental dissonance of being frustrated with a provider they themselves use.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

That's one reason to dislike Google. They push free (as in beer) services and standards until they kill all competitors, then let it rot. To me what they do is even worse than going with proprietary solutions from the start and charging for it, at least that's honest and fosters competition. Just look at what they did with Google Apps. Nowadays I only trust services where they profit (aka. anything that includes advertising), and none of the open standards they push forward.

creativityland 13y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself.
magicalist 13y ago
Except this is just generic Google comment #4 and has nothing to do with the current situation. AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP. Google Apps doesn't seem especially relevant, but it also has lots of competitors (including, just like chat, very active open source projects), hasn't been left to rot, and they've actually moved to only charging for it, instead of having an ad-supported version. ...so, are you really just talking about Reader?
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP. That's not how I see it at all. You make it look like they are improving the service and that requires breaking compatibility with XMPP, but it's yet another strategy to force users into Google+ by consolidating Google Talk under the "Hangouts" feature. Commitment to open standards is only skin deep.
  - magicalist 13y ago

MrQuincle 13y ago

It's just a matter of time before something like Vidyo [1] is replaced by WebRTC. There is too much at stake for Google to be the kitchen sink for all kind of technologies. They want you to connect to them. [1] http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/ http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/

zachgersh 13y ago

It's a defensive posture in response to what Apple has been doing with iMessage.

RivieraKid 13y ago

It's often not in the best interest of private companies to use open standards. If using an open standard is a net financial loss, why should the company do that? It's simply the result of how the system works. I've been thinking whether the rules (=laws) can be changed somehow to provide incentive for using open standards, but it's quite a complicated problem.

icebraining 13y ago
Instead of adding more rules with their inevitable unintended consequences, I'd rather we'd kill the rules that promote closed protocols, like the anti-reverse-engineering clauses and overreaching "anti-hacking" laws.

ausjke 13y ago

'dont be evil'

ausjke 13y ago
by down-voting this is getting even more evil, I don't mind what google does, just please don't wear a 'dont be evil' outfit while doing it, you can't have it both ways, why bother.
- runjake 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're being downvoted because your comment didn't add any value to the conversation. Beyond that, we see a "don't be evil" comment every time a Google-related post comes along.
  - ausjke 13y ago
    I hope we can have a google competitor on the horizon, it does not matter what google claims, once it starts to monopoly, it starts to get evil, i.e. forget about the interoperability, forget the open source, my way is the best,etc. google is becoming microsoft quickly under the new CEO, like many others, I'm finding alternatives for all related google services, I'm ok with that actually, just find its 'dont be evil' slogan becomes even more so ridiculous.
    - runjake 13y ago
      Entropy, my friend. Nothing lasts forever. The question is, is there a suitable replacement?
    - greiskul 13y ago
      Google doesn't have a monopoly in instant messaging. Far from it, they are lagging behind Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. What good is Google doing for the world having an open product that almost nobody uses?

tptacek 13y ago

I am not clear why EFF is lobbying on behalf of the XMPP standards foundation here. The entire computing industry is cluttered with opportunities for interoperable standards, some of which haven't been tried, some of which worked out, and some of which were attempted but (often correctly) jettisoned in favor of progress. Standardization is a good thing, but not the only good thing, and it always worries me when people make arguments that effectively demand that new offerings justify themselves (either with time or money) to existing standards groups.

jessriedel 13y ago
Am I misunderstanding, or does your last paragraph rule out social pressure as a force for standardization? Are you proposing that we simply allow standards to evolve according to the local incentives of individual agents?
- tptacek 13y ago
  Sometimes. Standards bodies are not themselves entirely benign. They're extremely susceptible to capture, and the incentives of those people not in service of some commercial agenda are often not aligned with users either. People sometimes lose sight of the real goal, which is interoperability. Interoperability is harmed not just by deliberately idiosyncratic implementations of old ideas, but by refusal to adapt to new ones.
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    Is SPDY and Microsoft's objections to it being implemented as HTTP 2.0 somehow serve as example to your expressed view?
ralphm 13y ago
This isn't so much about XMPP. Dropping federation, without notice to cross-boundary contacts, is the bigger thing for me. I am personally disappointed about the whole affair, especially because there is still no clear picture on why that would be necessary. As an XMPP Council member I can say that general consensus within the XMPP Standards Foundation is that we will just move forward, no longer constrained by things, like network security, Google never got around to implement.

djloche 13y ago

Google isn't abandoning open standards for instant messaging. They're abandoning instant messaging. They've moved from a real time communications tool to a messaging tool. This is incredibly frustrating for those who used previously used Google Talk for instant messaging purposes, but now have to look for other options outside the Google ecosystem.

swiil 13y ago

I switched back.

tn13 13y ago

Actually makes total sense. Companies like Google should always remain ahead of the curve. They should innovate much faster than any of the open standards could grow.

claudius 13y ago
They can use XMPP as a base and build extensions for everything they need atop of that, then use these extensions immediately while they go through the XSF and eventually become a standard. XMPP has sort of been designed with extensibility and innovation in mind.

yeleti 13y ago

We abandoned xmpp for node.js and websockets at www.tesla.im

nwmcsween 13y ago

Thank god XMPP is disgusting.

guest 13y ago

Internet abandons Google, heads back to the glory days of Prodigy and Compuserv. Sales of animated gif skyrocket, solving financial crisis.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

The sad thing is, no one has noticed that Hangouts is invoking a WebRTC plugin in my PulseAudio container, leading me to believe that they're already experimenting with WebRTC. With WebRTC, a proper signaling protocol (they're probably using Jingle anyway, give the RTC history and the fact that RTC relies and builds on Jingle), and a relay server, there's not much to need to do to interoperate if they wanted to enable it. This whole notion that they "can't" make it interoperable or that it will "slow them down", is complete and utter shit. Slow them down on what? All I've seen so far is more merging of GoogleTalk+GooglePlus and a rebranding effort. Basically no new feature, no integration with Google Voice, no seamless integration with SMS.

eunice 13y ago

IMAP in gmail next

rnicholson 13y ago
got a source? Or just wildly speculating?
- farinasa 13y ago
  They killed calDAV. IMAP is a bit of a jump, but mark my words, cardDAV will be next.

josteink 13y ago

Google abandoning open standards is nothing new. It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in a heartbeat and exploit that. Just look at what they did to the open web with Chrome. First they said "Web standards are important, so here is a good, fast and web-standards compliant browser. Feel free to try it". After a while that was not enough, and on every single web-page they had they had a big "Use Chrome!" ad for every visitor not using it already. Once they had gained enough dominance, suddenly Google started using non-W3C HTML in their production web-sites. HTML which had not been fully drafted or ratified and which was only available as they saw fit in web-kit. And then all the other non-Google browsers were suddenly "slow" on "adopting new HTML standards". Basically through its internet dominance, and now its browser, Google pushed through its own implementation of proprietary HTML features as standards other browsers had to implement, without any discussion, feedback or other input. Google just decided that they alone should dictate how the HTML-standard is from now on. After seeing that happen, I lost all belief in Google as a company which I will rely on for anything more than I strictly need to.

lucian1900 13y ago
This is not the case at all, though. WHATWG is a good example of several browser makers cooperating. The only thing entirely Chrome-only is NaCl and it's not exposed to web pages (just extensions).
Kequc 13y ago
Are you from the future? Because Chrome is leaving webkit in the coming weeks but they still haven't yet. Chrome uses the full set of W3C standards in use though webkit and not any custom version of it. http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4186302/google-chrome-blink-coming-to-chrome-28-in-10-weeks http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4186302/google-chrome-blink...
StavrosK 13y ago
> It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them To be fair, how did XMPP serve them? They weren't really benefitting from it, they did it mostly for the good of the community.

plywoodtrees 13y ago

I would also like an open standard but I had to laugh at the final sentence of the EFF statement: > To be clear, even the earlier [off-the-record] setting was far from perfect from a privacy perspective: disabling chat history only kept the logged messages out of your Gmail account, and didn't prevent other users, or Google itself, from keeping a record of the conversation. How on earth would you expect an open protocol to prevent the other keeping a record of a conversation? It's like asking for perfect DRM with open clients.

claudius 13y ago
They could[0] implement some client side actual OTR[1], at least blocking Google from keeping the clear-text message. No idea how they would want to force the intended recipient of the message not to store it, though. [0] In theory with infinite resources and time. Maybe. [1] Or any other sort of encryption.

fakeer 13y ago

Time for email, im, calendar, tasks, notes, docs and other services start-ups (for individual users). Better if they are decentralized. You wouldn't have to move everything at once. But this will also increase costs.

farinasa 13y ago

Google has dropped support for XMPP (chat) and calDAV (calendar syncing). What's next? cardDAV? IMAP?? Honestly I can see that Google is no longer interested in open protocols. They are afraid that it's too easy for their users to simply migrate everything away. Their response is to build a wall around their users. Enough red flags have been raised for me to, unfortunately, say goodbye. Perhaps I may still buy their hardware, but they want to isolate my data from every company but them. They are no longer reliable.

acd 13y ago

The Google mantra "Don't be evil" - not! Decision to drop XMPP is bad/evil. Seems more like the strategy of customer lock in.