12 ms·

Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

170 points by jwise0 12y ago

AceJohnny2 12y ago
Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?
- jkarneges 12y ago
  Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/
  - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
    This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs. This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol. Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location. The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS). I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone. I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
    - runn1ng 12y ago
      > Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them. Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
      - vitno 12y ago
        Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty. Some of us do care.
        runn1ng 12y ago
        Nice, I did not know. Really Where is the source code?
        julionc 12y ago
        The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
        runn1ng 12y ago
        It seems like the source for Arch discussion, that seems to be similar, but slightly different, to Hacker News. But it's better than nothing.
      - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
        But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests. So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
  - amyjess 12y ago
    It's worse now. Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client. But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.
- multiplicity 12y ago
  I had a unified messaging system, it was called Trillian and Adium, and it was awesome. Then one day, random people from Gmail started to appear in my Gtalk contact list, and the whole thing became useless and creepy.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system? We'll always have SMS.
  - GauntletWizard 12y ago
    SMS? Or SMS, iChat, Hangouts, Whatsapp, and the thousands of others that use your SMS number as username? Some (iChat, Hangouts) even steal your SMSs and place them on proprietary networks; If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      SMS, the network. > If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost. I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.
      - reustle 12y ago
        It doesn't matter if it is stupid simple, it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
        toomuchtodo 12y ago
        So start your own communications network. Market it. Make it open. May the best solution win.
        kedean 12y ago
        It's not about the best solution, and everyone needs to stop pretending it is. This sort of thing comes down to which solution has the most corporate backing. The only exceptions are when an open solution happens to hold on for long enough (on the order of years) for a major player to realize that its good and maybe they should give it a chance (example: OpenStack's support by PayPal right now, or when Linux finally started going someplace in the early 2000's with Canonical and RedHat). Give me an example of 'the best solution' winning despite major corporate backing of the proprietary competitor?
- cbhl 12y ago
  It's worth noting that XMPP was based on XML. New hotness is JSON, or maybe even compressed binary protocols.
  - jkarneges 12y ago
    The funny thing is that XMPP was created when XML was the current hotness. SMTP survived despite changing fads. If we're ever going to standardize IM (or anything), we have to accept that protocols may use older technology. Someday JSON will be old too. Let's not make these mistakes again.
    - olau 12y ago
      At the time when XMPP was getting standardized and was still mostly known as Jabber, I started implementing a Jabber chat client with a friend. The problem with XMPP isn't that it was based on XML. No, what made it annoying was that the dudes who made it decided that instead of basing it on exchanging individual messages, i.e. XML documents like everyone else does, everything must instead be put inside a so-called XML stream. IIRC it basically meant that the exchange started with a start tag that wasn't terminated until the connection was closed. Since nothing at the time was designed to work with unfinished XML documents (remember the end tag doesn't come until you're done), all the convenient standard XML tools/libraries wouldn't work. So I don't think XMPP is a stellar piece of work. But it's of course much better than some proprietary crap, and it's sad to see it lose support, although I imagine to Google and Facebook who both probably couldn't care less about interoperability, having an open XMPP interface is probably more of a liability (spammers, enables people to skip their ads) than something they get much perceived value out of.
      - jkarneges 12y ago
        Even though it seems like a strange decision, using XML for the stream framing made the protocol nicely pure. It theoretically meant you didn't need to write a parser (this was a rare thing for a network protocol). In practice, though, you're right, most parsers at the time didn't work well with network streams. Of course, lack of adoption by the big providers was almost certainly political rather than technical.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hengheng 12y ago
  So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work. I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work! Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.
  - click170 12y ago
    Can you go into detail about what features were lacking? For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.
    - hengheng 12y ago
      Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.
      - click170 12y ago
- na85 12y ago
  I've been saying for years that an update to the IRC protocol to allow for push notifications without requiring users to have a shell and set up a bnc would be pretty much ideal. The constant ping-pongs really dissuade me from using IRC on my mobile as it kills my battery life. Being able to set some kind of "mobile" mode and receive push notifications if I get a hilight would be ideal.
  - DanTheManPR 12y ago
    Some of the cloud-based IRC clients do a lot of this (I'm a big fan of IRCCloud). But it would be nice these kinds of features were baked into the protocol. When something like a majority of users want a feature, it should probably be part of the protocol.
  - BuildTheRobots 12y ago
    I've ended up using the www.ircCloud.com service as my bouncer. It gives lovely native mobile apps with proper push and has a much nicer/more usable interface than any other solution I was capable of rigging up myself.
ipsum2 12y ago
Is there any other way to work with Facebook Chat, now that XMPP is gone?
- jwise0 12y ago
  As far as I understand, no. (A request for an API to write a desktop client was the top "most-liked" comment on the Messenger-platform blog post, which is how I found out about this.)
- grandalf 12y ago
  Directly via the graph api. Simpler than xmpp. Someone recently posted a graph api chat example.
  - MBlume 12y ago
    Do we know if Adium/pidgin are likely to update to use that API, or is it too early to say?
    - baudehlo 12y ago
      Someone will build it. But it still just adds another proprietary API to the arsenal. Ugh. I echo other sentiments here: what exactly is broken about XMPP that companies keep moving away?
      - timonovici 12y ago
        Somebody already said it: while using the chat through a different client than their web chat, you're not looking at their ads, you're not installing their proprietary mobile app, and so on.
  - jwise0 12y ago
    You have to be an app developer for that to work: /me/threads is accessible only to developers of an app, and there is no permission that you can grant to an app to make it work. Otherwise, you get: { "error": { "message": "(#298) You must be a developer of the application", "type": "OAuthException", "code": 298 } } You get this even if you try to use the Graph API Explorer tool to view /me/threads.
kalessin 12y ago
That sucks, I really liked using Pidgin/Adium with Facebook chat.
kshitijl 12y ago
A long time ago I worked on the modified ejabberd servers that provide this service. A shame indeed.
- i386 12y ago
  I'd love to hear that story if you have the time...
- hengheng 12y ago
  Do you see a realistical future for the protocol? How large would the motifications have to be to reflect a "decent" feature set for the current device landscape and user's expectations?
Havoc 12y ago
I wish the entire Messenger went away - nothing but an extra FB annoyance forced onto me.
- thejosh 12y ago
  Turn off chat. Nothing is forced onto you.
  - Havoc 12y ago
    I never even turned it on. Since they split messenger off I can no longer read read messages on my cellphone...without installing a separate app. Functionality that worked perfectly fine previously until they decided to disable to force messenger onto people. http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/
    - 0x0 12y ago
      I agree. It is terrible and I have stopped responding to messages on facebook when I'm on mobile.
    - acdha 12y ago
      Can't you just open facebook.com in your phone's browser? I've been doing that for a couple of years since noticing that it's both faster and more reliable than the Facebook iOS app.
      - Havoc 12y ago
        Yeah its tedious though. So mostly I just decide it can wait till I get home and have access to a computer.
        traitorjoe 12y ago
        If you're on Android, you should check out Tinfoil for Facebook. It's a wrapper for facebook's mobile page. I find it more useful than the regular facebook app. You can also get notifications back using IFTTT.
0x0 12y ago
So this is how they make it a platform? :)
niravs 12y ago
Alternative to your desktop client. http://www.goofyapp.com/ http://www.goofyapp.com/
- beeman 12y ago
  Awesome, thanks! I was just looking for something like this today! :)
- jklp 12y ago
  I found out about Goofy a couple of months ago and when I'm at my desk, I don't have to use my phone at all for messaging (except for whatsapp). Now I'd wish someone would do the same for Gmail chat / Hangouts, or maybe a way to combine all the webviews into one ;)
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Whatsapp has a web client.
    - jklp 12y ago
      I saw this, but from what I understand it was only if you had an Android phone, and it needed to be beside you the whole time while it procesed the messages for you in the background?
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        Not beside you, just online, but yes.
  - xfalcox 12y ago
    Hangouts new chrome extension, the one with float circles, it's pretty good, and works on Linux.
    - izacus 12y ago
      Unfortunately it doesn't work well on OS X and still requires me to run Chrome in background next to the Firefox leading to alot of annoying horrible window switching issues (for some reason chrome apps tend to get stuck in background when alt-tabbing, sometimes it just hangs, burns alot of memory for a really simple interface....)
dorfsmay 12y ago
Considering that they never opened it to federation, does it even matter?
- wl 12y ago
  Desktop XMPP clients can no longer be used to chat on FB. That matters to me.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It matters in two ways: it further fragments the space (having one unified way to communicate with multiple services from multiple vendors especially such large ones is showing strong support for that unified way) and it limits access to the service through existing clients which will piss off a small but vocal (and likely early adopter so early leaver) section of the audience.
pikzen 12y ago
Welp, time to register an account on jabber.org I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it. Pidgin will probably see a sudden surge of bug reports.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it. Business strategies and decisions shift constantly.
- notatoad 12y ago
  I'm guessing it's a conflict between developers and management. Questions like "what protocol should we build our messaging system on top of" is an implementation detail decided on by the developers at the beginning of a product's lifespan. Stuff like handling encrypted messages gracefully is simply a developer doing their job thoroughly, not a directive from management to focus on the XMPP API. Then later in the product's life, when they want to build a platform and business integrations and sending money and all that other monetization stuff, restricting third party client access suddenly becomes important.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  pidgin, for all the flak it and libpurple gets, and huge backlog of feature requests and bugs, does a reasonably good job for me.
- simoncion 12y ago
  In my experience (as of about a year ago) the jabber.org servers are -I guess- seriously overloaded. Frequent disconnection or failures to login were the norm for my @jabber.org account. If I had to guess, I would bet that they're under frequent "attack", but I really have no idea. Does anyone have any more recent information on the health of jabber.org's XMPP service?
jwise0 12y ago
A quick comment on why I submitted this ... This will substantially change the way I interact with Facebook Messenger, and irritatingly so. For the past as long as I remember, all of my IM services have shown up in one client (naim; then Pidgin; then Adium). I'll now be forced to either use the Facebook web client (and, in doing so, feed the mis-tuned reward system in my brain that stimulates itself from seeing the notifications icon light up ...) or use a poor approximation of a keyboard on my cell phone. It's irritating when a service that I use gets shut down. But, the thing that's truly irritating to me is that I don't even have the option of not using it: I'm locked in still by network effects, and Facebook know it.
- hudell 12y ago
  I'm still not over the death of Facebook Messenger for Windows. I've tried to use Pidgin for a while, but Facebook would often stop working and only come back to life a few days later.
- mcescalante 12y ago
  I saw that they were deprecating the XMPP API right after they announced it, and I have been having nightmares about losing the ability to use Adium since. Still have no idea what I'm going to do if they truly don't release some type of client.
ar7hur 12y ago
This is a 11-month old announcement: On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.
jacquesm 12y ago
Everybody loves open standards until they are large enough to dictate their own.
automathematics 12y ago
Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is: 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her" 2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them). This has been a nightmare for me over the last 2 years and I can't stand how something as simple and SOLVED as chat protocol has been nuked and replaced with proprietary crap that thinks it's impressive to announce a semantic MAJOR release update that touts "Group Messaging" as a major new innovation (I'm looking at you, Apple). Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and be done with it.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  setup a ejabberd server on a beaglebone and put a web xmpp client on it. encrypt the shit out of everything, get your friends on to it. i'm sure there's valid business reasons to kill xmpp, not just total information awareness pressures from above.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    i suggested this because i believe xmpp to be superior to irc.
    - simoncion 12y ago
      Step #4 (get your friends to use it) is really hard to do. I tried and failed with my friend group. If there's one non-technical user in the group (or one who is tremendously attached to their Hangouts chat history), you're probably doomed to failure.
      - throwawayaway 12y ago
        i've had limited success, one factor that helped was me going cold turkey on the alternatives. also you define your own success, gaining a monopoly is rather a high standard!
jonalmeida 12y ago
To play devil's advocate, what part of the XMPP protocol is dated, that doesn't allow Facebook and Google to continue using it? Maybe if there's a way to update XMPP to include features that shared amongst these services, they can fall back to using it?
- yellowbkpk 12y ago
  The part where when you're using XMPP you're not on their website looking at their ads.
- whoopdedo 12y ago
  Probably missing the feature that requires users of external networks to register with Facebook or Google in order to send messages on the Facebook or Google network.
- Veratyr 12y ago
  A big problem for me is that there's no push notification standard. This means that a mobile device needs to keep the app running and stay awake to receive messages. This kills batteries faster than you might expect.
- giovannibajo1 12y ago
  Just like SIP, XMPP is one thing on paper (with all extensions) and a different thing in reality, where different clients communicate through different servers with different set of extensions. What you can always do reliably is have a buddy list with status presence, and do 1-1 chats. In my company, with all Linux clients, we couldn't even manage to send files reliably across different clients. What Google and Facebook need across a messaging service is much more: * sending pictures, displayed inline * sending audio messages * making phone and video calls * sending money * being battery friendly through push notifications * having chat history reliably stored across devices * persistent group chats with advanced client-level tuning (eg: turn off notifications), again shared through multiple devices Notice that most of these features require implementation and design on both the server and client level; not having control over client implementations means it might take many years to get a feature standardized and adopted by the majority of clients. I think Google really tried to make XMPP go forward, but in the end it was slowly them down too much compared to competitors going full proprietary like Apple.
Steko 12y ago
We need two things. The first is a piece of software or robot that can just keep browser tabs open along with iMessage/wechat clients whatever and then reads it and transfers any message that comes thru one of these locked down services to the second thing which is an open federated universal communication service/app. This app would have a slider at the top and if the slider is all the way on the left you get 1-1 messages/mail from the most important people in your social network and all the way on the right you get 1 to many things of people you don't even know but you follow on Twitter/twitch/youtube/RSS/tv shows you watch. This app makes money because people/advertisers can pay to increase how close they are to you for one message and the money is split with the user who also sets the cost. So for a million dollars you could call Jay Z who might be sleeping but he's making 500k so what the hell, sure he'll listen to your demo.
- cvs268 12y ago
  ...and fast forward few years and you have the Black-Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" happening world-wide. How long do you think it will take for advertisers to realise that people will watch "stuff" even if you don't pay them as long as they have nothing better to do. Add to this the fact that major media outlets (movie productions, tv-channels) will jump at the chance to broadcast ads as entertainment. A very dark future awaits us...
zobzu 12y ago
quick, deprecate all the things that are open. the wave of openneness that started with the web is being extinguished everywhere. mind you, one could improve XMPP, or come up with an open alternative. But this is no longer the focus. Short term money and numbers is/are the focus, as per pre-web companies. This model always end up being bad for the masses of course, and only good for a few.
Podeau 12y ago
Let's hope for an official desktop client of Messenger...
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Will it need the endless list of permissions like it does on Android? It seems to want access to my entire phone, life, brain patterns and toilet usage patterns. In all seriousness, there is no indication as to what a desktop app is accessing or doing, and given the extensive "fingers in all pies" access that the Android one has, I wouldn't be quick to install a Facebook native app on my desktop!
miduil 12y ago
I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then. So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure 'evilness'. They were probably facing various of problems with XMPP, and already switched with their infrastructure from XMPP to their own 'inventions'. If their own development is already proven to be working, they don't have a reason to stay at the expensive XMPP protocol. [1] & [2]: I understand why XMPP can be nice to build into your applications (there's even a social network based on XMPP), especially in the early stage, but when you go big - or mobile, I guess the 'flaws' in the protocol are just becoming annoying (Disclaimer I've no clue what I'm writing about) I wonder why there is no better open protocol or standard for text chat, and if - how can we encourage facebook & other giants to use it. I'm curious how tox [3] is going to do in near future. At the moment, it feels like XMPP is the only open chat solution, which no-one can touch since Pidgin, Adium & Gajim are all broken (I'm still thankful for this tools!). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 [2]: http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber [3]: https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page
- Johnny_Brahms 12y ago
  I read through some github discussions in the tox github page, and I can't really shake the feeling that they don't know much security. Someone had a question about the protocol design and about how secure it was, and the dev just linked to NaCl and said "read the source here and you will see that tox is secure". It didn't really boost my confidence in their protocol design...
  - RaleyField 12y ago
    Can you link to the offending conversation?
klekticist 12y ago
Is there any alternative API? That is, if I'm interested in creating something that interacts with Facebook chat, am I now out of luck? Thanks.
- bdcravens 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722
dade_ 12y ago
I only realized XMPP support was ending a month ago, I am not sure how I missed the notification but this just introduces a new way for me to miss messages. I think the writing is on the wall for XMPP, even Cisco is now working on Project Squared/ Spark and I expect will be killing off their Jabber software (The tone from their collaboration SMEs has become quite negative). Personally I believe WebRTC based technology can provide a much better user experience and more powerful capabilities than XMPP. Further, as a front end to SIP, it could be a great thing for interoperability, especially with PSTN. However, it really looks like it is being used as an excuse to create new walled gardens. Fortunately some carriers are migrating to IMS and provide softclients for computers, tablets and smart phones (Rogers One Number, and Telus Extend). This is the lowest common denominator, but I can chat with everyone with SMS as well as make phone calls from whatever device I choose. However, although technically possible, multiuser chat and presence is still not available. So here we are 20 years later, and chat is more fragmented than ever, but at least unlimited SMS is now common. AT&T and Verizon are finally beginning migration to IP peering which opens the way for video calling over the PSTN. I think there is an opportunity for carriers here if they would get their act together. 6+ platforms (Skype, Hangouts, FB Messenger, iMessage, BBM, SMS) really doesn't work for me.
gwillen 12y ago
I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page: http://hnrankings.info/9266769/ http://hnrankings.info/9266769/ Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?
- garethadams 12y ago
  Probably the fact that it was announced last April
zamalek 12y ago
Zuckerberg sure has been interesting this week: > Developers please use our platform! > Developers we are now going to obsolete any work you've done with the XMPP front-end. Demonstrating a clear moving target is not how you attract developers, Facebook.
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  It all reminds me of this post: http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg Facebook is trying to make the platform too good for startups to resist building on. By the time something built on the platform emerges as a success, Facebook can either heavy-hand them into an acquisition, or lock them out and take away their momentum.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    It's as though they are trying to get everyone else to do their RND. You float the risk and if it works they implement it. Genius, really.
    - smrtinsert 12y ago
      The latter seemed obvious to many people though. I think a lot of people ran with that risk anyway in hopes of becoming an acquisition.
fenesiistvan 12y ago
Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used? https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt -based on open standards (SIP) -supported by most VoIP servers (so we have full interoperability between vendors such as Cisco, Huawei, Siemens, Voipswitch, Mizutech, Jitsi and others) -simple and extendable -lots of free services, free/open source software. You can also host your own or integrate into your company PBX In the previous years, we always see the same path for messaging applications: 1. Startup company add messaging based on open standards (SIP/IRC/XMPP/other?) 2. One the company has significant user base, switches to a non-standard / proprietary protocol Already happened for Skype, Yahoo, Google, Facebook
- zmb_ 12y ago
  >-simple and extendable It's the first time I hear anyone describe SIP as "simple". If you printed out all the SIP specs, you'd probably have a pile close to a meter high. Among the protocol crowd (including IETFers) SIP is often regarded as an example of protocol design having gone off the rails in a spectacular fashion. It has been repeatedly beat in the market by proprietary protocols that do things better (e.g., see the mess SIP NAT traversal ended up as compared to Skype).
  - fenesiistvan 12y ago
    Yes, the SIP protocol is not so simple. However a lot of well working implementations already exists (source code, libraries, ready to use software). The core messaging in SIP (RFC 3428) is extremely simple to add as it is just a single method (MESSAGE). Adding presence and other funny things with the SIMPLE protocol family is another subject. (However the basic presence is also very simple ...the complications comes when you wish to add file transfer and other fancy things). But these can be used as an extra so at least the for chat you are fully interoperable with all other vendors.
- zamalek 12y ago
  I've heard from people who have tried to implement it: SIMPLE (3428) is anything but simple. It is a very good example of "enterprise design." In addition, as soon as you start extending the protocol there is a very good chance that your implementation will no longer be interoperable. Take Lync (Microsoft's implementation of SIMPLE) as an example: due to the presence of custom extensions, clients have to implement specific support for it - the protocol doesn't gracefully degrade like XMPP does. Basically, XMPP came first (first foot in the door) and is a significantly superior protocol due to its simplicity.
vezycash 12y ago
If you "follow the money," then this move makes sense. This is simply a move to display ads to every person using Facebook chat. (Facebook's not happy that they couldn't show ads to those of us using pidgin et al)
jamespo 12y ago
Another stab between the shoulder blades for those of us who like to live in the command line.
edem 12y ago
Is there an alternative to Pidgin in this regard? I only use Facebook to chat with my friends (over Pidgin) and I don't want to touch their website if possible.
- pavelgavlik 12y ago
  I would be also interested in Messenger integration in Adium (It uses same library as Pidgin.).
rilita 12y ago
IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better. Why does a system with the following features not exist: 1. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol 2. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a server ) 3. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or the like ) and some web language ( Python & Dynamic JS ) 3b. Has a free open source server reference implementation 4. Logging on the server indefinitely 5. Is always encrypted ( end to end via public keys, so that clear data never reaches the servers ) 6. Offline messaging 7. Large file transfer with clean re-connection and continuation ( if neither party has a publicly accessible port, payment/membership to the server would be required to facilitate the transfer... ) 8. Random chat 9. Group chat 10. Utf8 for full multi-lingual use 11. Index of users for finding other users If someone would just create such a thing it would put an end to all the stupid shifting from one system to another from year to year. I'm getting tired of switching systems and reverse engineering shitty protocols in order to continue doing the same thing with less features.
- boomzilla 12y ago
  Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub-seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be responded later instead of NOW. I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with emails.
  - rilita 12y ago
    Email fails in the following ways: 1. Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another. 5. The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the message itself 7. Large file transfer via email is horrible and extremely limited 8. No random chat support 9. No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat ) 10. Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires getting and using a font that supports the codepoints ) 11. No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is used by all people using email ) 12. No real time messaging support. Inherent in the discussion is that chat software is insant, not based on server polling.
luxpir 12y ago
Note to those setting up new XMPP accounts: DuckDuckGo has a solid XMPP server[7] available for public use. They do their damnedest to protect privacy also, from what I understand. That'll be all. -- [7] https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber
shmerl 12y ago
Another one turns sour. But FB server was never federated anyway, so good riddance.

170 points by jwise0 12y ago

Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

jkarneges 12y ago
Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/
- TaylorAlexander 12y ago
  This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs. This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol. Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location. The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS). I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone. I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
  - runn1ng 12y ago
    > Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them. Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
    - vitno 12y ago
      Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty. Some of us do care.
      - runn1ng 12y ago
        Nice, I did not know. Really Where is the source code?
        julionc 12y ago
        The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
        runn1ng 12y ago
        It seems like the source for Arch discussion, that seems to be similar, but slightly different, to Hacker News. But it's better than nothing.
    - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
      But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests. So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
- amyjess 12y ago
  It's worse now. Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client. But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.
multiplicity 12y ago
I had a unified messaging system, it was called Trillian and Adium, and it was awesome. Then one day, random people from Gmail started to appear in my Gtalk contact list, and the whole thing became useless and creepy.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system? We'll always have SMS.
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  SMS? Or SMS, iChat, Hangouts, Whatsapp, and the thousands of others that use your SMS number as username? Some (iChat, Hangouts) even steal your SMSs and place them on proprietary networks; If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    SMS, the network. > If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost. I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.
    - reustle 12y ago
      It doesn't matter if it is stupid simple, it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        So start your own communications network. Market it. Make it open. May the best solution win.
        kedean 12y ago
        It's not about the best solution, and everyone needs to stop pretending it is. This sort of thing comes down to which solution has the most corporate backing. The only exceptions are when an open solution happens to hold on for long enough (on the order of years) for a major player to realize that its good and maybe they should give it a chance (example: OpenStack's support by PayPal right now, or when Linux finally started going someplace in the early 2000's with Canonical and RedHat). Give me an example of 'the best solution' winning despite major corporate backing of the proprietary competitor?
cbhl 12y ago
It's worth noting that XMPP was based on XML. New hotness is JSON, or maybe even compressed binary protocols.
- jkarneges 12y ago
  The funny thing is that XMPP was created when XML was the current hotness. SMTP survived despite changing fads. If we're ever going to standardize IM (or anything), we have to accept that protocols may use older technology. Someday JSON will be old too. Let's not make these mistakes again.
  - olau 12y ago
    At the time when XMPP was getting standardized and was still mostly known as Jabber, I started implementing a Jabber chat client with a friend. The problem with XMPP isn't that it was based on XML. No, what made it annoying was that the dudes who made it decided that instead of basing it on exchanging individual messages, i.e. XML documents like everyone else does, everything must instead be put inside a so-called XML stream. IIRC it basically meant that the exchange started with a start tag that wasn't terminated until the connection was closed. Since nothing at the time was designed to work with unfinished XML documents (remember the end tag doesn't come until you're done), all the convenient standard XML tools/libraries wouldn't work. So I don't think XMPP is a stellar piece of work. But it's of course much better than some proprietary crap, and it's sad to see it lose support, although I imagine to Google and Facebook who both probably couldn't care less about interoperability, having an open XMPP interface is probably more of a liability (spammers, enables people to skip their ads) than something they get much perceived value out of.
    - jkarneges 12y ago
      Even though it seems like a strange decision, using XML for the stream framing made the protocol nicely pure. It theoretically meant you didn't need to write a parser (this was a rare thing for a network protocol). In practice, though, you're right, most parsers at the time didn't work well with network streams. Of course, lack of adoption by the big providers was almost certainly political rather than technical.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hengheng 12y ago
So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work. I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work! Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.
- click170 12y ago
  Can you go into detail about what features were lacking? For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.
  - hengheng 12y ago
    Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.
    - click170 12y ago
na85 12y ago
I've been saying for years that an update to the IRC protocol to allow for push notifications without requiring users to have a shell and set up a bnc would be pretty much ideal. The constant ping-pongs really dissuade me from using IRC on my mobile as it kills my battery life. Being able to set some kind of "mobile" mode and receive push notifications if I get a hilight would be ideal.
- DanTheManPR 12y ago
  Some of the cloud-based IRC clients do a lot of this (I'm a big fan of IRCCloud). But it would be nice these kinds of features were baked into the protocol. When something like a majority of users want a feature, it should probably be part of the protocol.
- BuildTheRobots 12y ago
  I've ended up using the www.ircCloud.com service as my bouncer. It gives lovely native mobile apps with proper push and has a much nicer/more usable interface than any other solution I was capable of rigging up myself.

ipsum2 12y ago

Is there any other way to work with Facebook Chat, now that XMPP is gone?

jwise0 12y ago
As far as I understand, no. (A request for an API to write a desktop client was the top "most-liked" comment on the Messenger-platform blog post, which is how I found out about this.)
grandalf 12y ago
Directly via the graph api. Simpler than xmpp. Someone recently posted a graph api chat example.
- MBlume 12y ago
  Do we know if Adium/pidgin are likely to update to use that API, or is it too early to say?
  - baudehlo 12y ago
    Someone will build it. But it still just adds another proprietary API to the arsenal. Ugh. I echo other sentiments here: what exactly is broken about XMPP that companies keep moving away?
    - timonovici 12y ago
      Somebody already said it: while using the chat through a different client than their web chat, you're not looking at their ads, you're not installing their proprietary mobile app, and so on.
- jwise0 12y ago
  You have to be an app developer for that to work: /me/threads is accessible only to developers of an app, and there is no permission that you can grant to an app to make it work. Otherwise, you get: { "error": { "message": "(#298) You must be a developer of the application", "type": "OAuthException", "code": 298 } } You get this even if you try to use the Graph API Explorer tool to view /me/threads.

kalessin 12y ago

That sucks, I really liked using Pidgin/Adium with Facebook chat.

kshitijl 12y ago

A long time ago I worked on the modified ejabberd servers that provide this service. A shame indeed.

i386 12y ago
I'd love to hear that story if you have the time...
hengheng 12y ago
Do you see a realistical future for the protocol? How large would the motifications have to be to reflect a "decent" feature set for the current device landscape and user's expectations?

Havoc 12y ago

I wish the entire Messenger went away - nothing but an extra FB annoyance forced onto me.

thejosh 12y ago
Turn off chat. Nothing is forced onto you.
- Havoc 12y ago
  I never even turned it on. Since they split messenger off I can no longer read read messages on my cellphone...without installing a separate app. Functionality that worked perfectly fine previously until they decided to disable to force messenger onto people. http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/
  - 0x0 12y ago
    I agree. It is terrible and I have stopped responding to messages on facebook when I'm on mobile.
  - acdha 12y ago
    Can't you just open facebook.com in your phone's browser? I've been doing that for a couple of years since noticing that it's both faster and more reliable than the Facebook iOS app.
    - Havoc 12y ago
      Yeah its tedious though. So mostly I just decide it can wait till I get home and have access to a computer.
      - traitorjoe 12y ago
        If you're on Android, you should check out Tinfoil for Facebook. It's a wrapper for facebook's mobile page. I find it more useful than the regular facebook app. You can also get notifications back using IFTTT.

0x0 12y ago

So this is how they make it a platform? :)

niravs 12y ago

Alternative to your desktop client. http://www.goofyapp.com/ http://www.goofyapp.com/

beeman 12y ago
Awesome, thanks! I was just looking for something like this today! :)
jklp 12y ago
I found out about Goofy a couple of months ago and when I'm at my desk, I don't have to use my phone at all for messaging (except for whatsapp). Now I'd wish someone would do the same for Gmail chat / Hangouts, or maybe a way to combine all the webviews into one ;)
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Whatsapp has a web client.
  - jklp 12y ago
    I saw this, but from what I understand it was only if you had an Android phone, and it needed to be beside you the whole time while it procesed the messages for you in the background?
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      Not beside you, just online, but yes.
- xfalcox 12y ago
  Hangouts new chrome extension, the one with float circles, it's pretty good, and works on Linux.
  - izacus 12y ago
    Unfortunately it doesn't work well on OS X and still requires me to run Chrome in background next to the Firefox leading to alot of annoying horrible window switching issues (for some reason chrome apps tend to get stuck in background when alt-tabbing, sometimes it just hangs, burns alot of memory for a really simple interface....)

dorfsmay 12y ago

Considering that they never opened it to federation, does it even matter?

wl 12y ago
Desktop XMPP clients can no longer be used to chat on FB. That matters to me.
jacquesm 12y ago
It matters in two ways: it further fragments the space (having one unified way to communicate with multiple services from multiple vendors especially such large ones is showing strong support for that unified way) and it limits access to the service through existing clients which will piss off a small but vocal (and likely early adopter so early leaver) section of the audience.

pikzen 12y ago

Welp, time to register an account on jabber.org I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it. Pidgin will probably see a sudden surge of bug reports.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it. Business strategies and decisions shift constantly.
notatoad 12y ago
I'm guessing it's a conflict between developers and management. Questions like "what protocol should we build our messaging system on top of" is an implementation detail decided on by the developers at the beginning of a product's lifespan. Stuff like handling encrypted messages gracefully is simply a developer doing their job thoroughly, not a directive from management to focus on the XMPP API. Then later in the product's life, when they want to build a platform and business integrations and sending money and all that other monetization stuff, restricting third party client access suddenly becomes important.
throwawayaway 12y ago
pidgin, for all the flak it and libpurple gets, and huge backlog of feature requests and bugs, does a reasonably good job for me.
simoncion 12y ago
In my experience (as of about a year ago) the jabber.org servers are -I guess- seriously overloaded. Frequent disconnection or failures to login were the norm for my @jabber.org account. If I had to guess, I would bet that they're under frequent "attack", but I really have no idea. Does anyone have any more recent information on the health of jabber.org's XMPP service?

jwise0 12y ago

A quick comment on why I submitted this ... This will substantially change the way I interact with Facebook Messenger, and irritatingly so. For the past as long as I remember, all of my IM services have shown up in one client (naim; then Pidgin; then Adium). I'll now be forced to either use the Facebook web client (and, in doing so, feed the mis-tuned reward system in my brain that stimulates itself from seeing the notifications icon light up ...) or use a poor approximation of a keyboard on my cell phone. It's irritating when a service that I use gets shut down. But, the thing that's truly irritating to me is that I don't even have the option of not using it: I'm locked in still by network effects, and Facebook know it.

hudell 12y ago
I'm still not over the death of Facebook Messenger for Windows. I've tried to use Pidgin for a while, but Facebook would often stop working and only come back to life a few days later.
mcescalante 12y ago
I saw that they were deprecating the XMPP API right after they announced it, and I have been having nightmares about losing the ability to use Adium since. Still have no idea what I'm going to do if they truly don't release some type of client.

ar7hur 12y ago

This is a 11-month old announcement: On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.

jacquesm 12y ago

Everybody loves open standards until they are large enough to dictate their own.

automathematics 12y ago

Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is: 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her" 2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them). This has been a nightmare for me over the last 2 years and I can't stand how something as simple and SOLVED as chat protocol has been nuked and replaced with proprietary crap that thinks it's impressive to announce a semantic MAJOR release update that touts "Group Messaging" as a major new innovation (I'm looking at you, Apple). Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and be done with it.

throwawayaway 12y ago
setup a ejabberd server on a beaglebone and put a web xmpp client on it. encrypt the shit out of everything, get your friends on to it. i'm sure there's valid business reasons to kill xmpp, not just total information awareness pressures from above.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  i suggested this because i believe xmpp to be superior to irc.
  - simoncion 12y ago
    Step #4 (get your friends to use it) is really hard to do. I tried and failed with my friend group. If there's one non-technical user in the group (or one who is tremendously attached to their Hangouts chat history), you're probably doomed to failure.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      i've had limited success, one factor that helped was me going cold turkey on the alternatives. also you define your own success, gaining a monopoly is rather a high standard!

jonalmeida 12y ago

To play devil's advocate, what part of the XMPP protocol is dated, that doesn't allow Facebook and Google to continue using it? Maybe if there's a way to update XMPP to include features that shared amongst these services, they can fall back to using it?

yellowbkpk 12y ago
The part where when you're using XMPP you're not on their website looking at their ads.
whoopdedo 12y ago
Probably missing the feature that requires users of external networks to register with Facebook or Google in order to send messages on the Facebook or Google network.
Veratyr 12y ago
A big problem for me is that there's no push notification standard. This means that a mobile device needs to keep the app running and stay awake to receive messages. This kills batteries faster than you might expect.
giovannibajo1 12y ago
Just like SIP, XMPP is one thing on paper (with all extensions) and a different thing in reality, where different clients communicate through different servers with different set of extensions. What you can always do reliably is have a buddy list with status presence, and do 1-1 chats. In my company, with all Linux clients, we couldn't even manage to send files reliably across different clients. What Google and Facebook need across a messaging service is much more: * sending pictures, displayed inline * sending audio messages * making phone and video calls * sending money * being battery friendly through push notifications * having chat history reliably stored across devices * persistent group chats with advanced client-level tuning (eg: turn off notifications), again shared through multiple devices Notice that most of these features require implementation and design on both the server and client level; not having control over client implementations means it might take many years to get a feature standardized and adopted by the majority of clients. I think Google really tried to make XMPP go forward, but in the end it was slowly them down too much compared to competitors going full proprietary like Apple.

Steko 12y ago

We need two things. The first is a piece of software or robot that can just keep browser tabs open along with iMessage/wechat clients whatever and then reads it and transfers any message that comes thru one of these locked down services to the second thing which is an open federated universal communication service/app. This app would have a slider at the top and if the slider is all the way on the left you get 1-1 messages/mail from the most important people in your social network and all the way on the right you get 1 to many things of people you don't even know but you follow on Twitter/twitch/youtube/RSS/tv shows you watch. This app makes money because people/advertisers can pay to increase how close they are to you for one message and the money is split with the user who also sets the cost. So for a million dollars you could call Jay Z who might be sleeping but he's making 500k so what the hell, sure he'll listen to your demo.

cvs268 12y ago
...and fast forward few years and you have the Black-Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" happening world-wide. How long do you think it will take for advertisers to realise that people will watch "stuff" even if you don't pay them as long as they have nothing better to do. Add to this the fact that major media outlets (movie productions, tv-channels) will jump at the chance to broadcast ads as entertainment. A very dark future awaits us...

zobzu 12y ago

quick, deprecate all the things that are open. the wave of openneness that started with the web is being extinguished everywhere. mind you, one could improve XMPP, or come up with an open alternative. But this is no longer the focus. Short term money and numbers is/are the focus, as per pre-web companies. This model always end up being bad for the masses of course, and only good for a few.

Podeau 12y ago

Let's hope for an official desktop client of Messenger...

72deluxe 12y ago
Will it need the endless list of permissions like it does on Android? It seems to want access to my entire phone, life, brain patterns and toilet usage patterns. In all seriousness, there is no indication as to what a desktop app is accessing or doing, and given the extensive "fingers in all pies" access that the Android one has, I wouldn't be quick to install a Facebook native app on my desktop!

miduil 12y ago

I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then. So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure 'evilness'. They were probably facing various of problems with XMPP, and already switched with their infrastructure from XMPP to their own 'inventions'. If their own development is already proven to be working, they don't have a reason to stay at the expensive XMPP protocol. [1] & [2]: I understand why XMPP can be nice to build into your applications (there's even a social network based on XMPP), especially in the early stage, but when you go big - or mobile, I guess the 'flaws' in the protocol are just becoming annoying (Disclaimer I've no clue what I'm writing about) I wonder why there is no better open protocol or standard for text chat, and if - how can we encourage facebook & other giants to use it. I'm curious how tox [3] is going to do in near future. At the moment, it feels like XMPP is the only open chat solution, which no-one can touch since Pidgin, Adium & Gajim are all broken (I'm still thankful for this tools!). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 [2]: http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber [3]: https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page

Johnny_Brahms 12y ago
I read through some github discussions in the tox github page, and I can't really shake the feeling that they don't know much security. Someone had a question about the protocol design and about how secure it was, and the dev just linked to NaCl and said "read the source here and you will see that tox is secure". It didn't really boost my confidence in their protocol design...
- RaleyField 12y ago
  Can you link to the offending conversation?

klekticist 12y ago

Is there any alternative API? That is, if I'm interested in creating something that interacts with Facebook chat, am I now out of luck? Thanks.

bdcravens 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722

dade_ 12y ago

I only realized XMPP support was ending a month ago, I am not sure how I missed the notification but this just introduces a new way for me to miss messages. I think the writing is on the wall for XMPP, even Cisco is now working on Project Squared/ Spark and I expect will be killing off their Jabber software (The tone from their collaboration SMEs has become quite negative). Personally I believe WebRTC based technology can provide a much better user experience and more powerful capabilities than XMPP. Further, as a front end to SIP, it could be a great thing for interoperability, especially with PSTN. However, it really looks like it is being used as an excuse to create new walled gardens. Fortunately some carriers are migrating to IMS and provide softclients for computers, tablets and smart phones (Rogers One Number, and Telus Extend). This is the lowest common denominator, but I can chat with everyone with SMS as well as make phone calls from whatever device I choose. However, although technically possible, multiuser chat and presence is still not available. So here we are 20 years later, and chat is more fragmented than ever, but at least unlimited SMS is now common. AT&T and Verizon are finally beginning migration to IP peering which opens the way for video calling over the PSTN. I think there is an opportunity for carriers here if they would get their act together. 6+ platforms (Skype, Hangouts, FB Messenger, iMessage, BBM, SMS) really doesn't work for me.

gwillen 12y ago

I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page: http://hnrankings.info/9266769/ http://hnrankings.info/9266769/ Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?

garethadams 12y ago
Probably the fact that it was announced last April

zamalek 12y ago

Zuckerberg sure has been interesting this week: > Developers please use our platform! > Developers we are now going to obsolete any work you've done with the XMPP front-end. Demonstrating a clear moving target is not how you attract developers, Facebook.

LewisJEllis 12y ago
It all reminds me of this post: http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg Facebook is trying to make the platform too good for startups to resist building on. By the time something built on the platform emerges as a success, Facebook can either heavy-hand them into an acquisition, or lock them out and take away their momentum.
- zamalek 12y ago
  It's as though they are trying to get everyone else to do their RND. You float the risk and if it works they implement it. Genius, really.
  - smrtinsert 12y ago
    The latter seemed obvious to many people though. I think a lot of people ran with that risk anyway in hopes of becoming an acquisition.

fenesiistvan 12y ago

Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used? https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt -based on open standards (SIP) -supported by most VoIP servers (so we have full interoperability between vendors such as Cisco, Huawei, Siemens, Voipswitch, Mizutech, Jitsi and others) -simple and extendable -lots of free services, free/open source software. You can also host your own or integrate into your company PBX In the previous years, we always see the same path for messaging applications: 1. Startup company add messaging based on open standards (SIP/IRC/XMPP/other?) 2. One the company has significant user base, switches to a non-standard / proprietary protocol Already happened for Skype, Yahoo, Google, Facebook

zmb_ 12y ago
>-simple and extendable It's the first time I hear anyone describe SIP as "simple". If you printed out all the SIP specs, you'd probably have a pile close to a meter high. Among the protocol crowd (including IETFers) SIP is often regarded as an example of protocol design having gone off the rails in a spectacular fashion. It has been repeatedly beat in the market by proprietary protocols that do things better (e.g., see the mess SIP NAT traversal ended up as compared to Skype).
- fenesiistvan 12y ago
  Yes, the SIP protocol is not so simple. However a lot of well working implementations already exists (source code, libraries, ready to use software). The core messaging in SIP (RFC 3428) is extremely simple to add as it is just a single method (MESSAGE). Adding presence and other funny things with the SIMPLE protocol family is another subject. (However the basic presence is also very simple ...the complications comes when you wish to add file transfer and other fancy things). But these can be used as an extra so at least the for chat you are fully interoperable with all other vendors.
zamalek 12y ago
I've heard from people who have tried to implement it: SIMPLE (3428) is anything but simple. It is a very good example of "enterprise design." In addition, as soon as you start extending the protocol there is a very good chance that your implementation will no longer be interoperable. Take Lync (Microsoft's implementation of SIMPLE) as an example: due to the presence of custom extensions, clients have to implement specific support for it - the protocol doesn't gracefully degrade like XMPP does. Basically, XMPP came first (first foot in the door) and is a significantly superior protocol due to its simplicity.

vezycash 12y ago

If you "follow the money," then this move makes sense. This is simply a move to display ads to every person using Facebook chat. (Facebook's not happy that they couldn't show ads to those of us using pidgin et al)

jamespo 12y ago

Another stab between the shoulder blades for those of us who like to live in the command line.

edem 12y ago

Is there an alternative to Pidgin in this regard? I only use Facebook to chat with my friends (over Pidgin) and I don't want to touch their website if possible.

pavelgavlik 12y ago
I would be also interested in Messenger integration in Adium (It uses same library as Pidgin.).

rilita 12y ago

IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better. Why does a system with the following features not exist: 1. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol 2. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a server ) 3. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or the like ) and some web language ( Python & Dynamic JS ) 3b. Has a free open source server reference implementation 4. Logging on the server indefinitely 5. Is always encrypted ( end to end via public keys, so that clear data never reaches the servers ) 6. Offline messaging 7. Large file transfer with clean re-connection and continuation ( if neither party has a publicly accessible port, payment/membership to the server would be required to facilitate the transfer... ) 8. Random chat 9. Group chat 10. Utf8 for full multi-lingual use 11. Index of users for finding other users If someone would just create such a thing it would put an end to all the stupid shifting from one system to another from year to year. I'm getting tired of switching systems and reverse engineering shitty protocols in order to continue doing the same thing with less features.

boomzilla 12y ago
Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub-seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be responded later instead of NOW. I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with emails.
- rilita 12y ago
  Email fails in the following ways: 1. Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another. 5. The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the message itself 7. Large file transfer via email is horrible and extremely limited 8. No random chat support 9. No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat ) 10. Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires getting and using a font that supports the codepoints ) 11. No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is used by all people using email ) 12. No real time messaging support. Inherent in the discussion is that chat software is insant, not based on server polling.

luxpir 12y ago

Note to those setting up new XMPP accounts: DuckDuckGo has a solid XMPP server[7] available for public use. They do their damnedest to protect privacy also, from what I understand. That'll be all. -- [7] https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber

shmerl 12y ago

Another one turns sour. But FB server was never federated anyway, so good riddance.