Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
> It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose.
Yes, as a (former* ) XMPP advocate, this makes me sad. But it's really WhatsApp's attitude towards 3rd party clients that have me blacklisting them for myself as well as family and friends. This is the antithesis of what XMPP was supposed to bring. It's like nega-XMPP.
* XMPP as a standard and as community implementation missed to jump to mobile. Because it's open, it can eventually get there, but it makes me sad and angry how Jingle (Google's Voice & Video extension) was poorly adopted by clients for years. And now we have Hangouts...
Yes, poor Jingle support really puzzles me. It's not new, but I barely ever manage to connect two different clients without problems for video calls. That's besides the fact that most clients don't support it at all yet...
I don't have much respect for Hangouts really. If Google wanted to improve things they could propose Hangouts protocol as a replacement for XMPP. Make it an open IETF standard. They were such backers of XMPP in the past. And what did they do instead? Another walled garden and proprietary protocol. Total failure Google. That was the point when I said - you are lying about not being evil.
My understanding for poor Jingle support is that, whereas text is easy and low-bandwidth (so you can afford to send everything through a 3rd party server with easy connection semantics), voice and video are much, much much more complicated: not only do you have multiple voice and video codecs with iffy support and stability (sure, even if support library claims to support CodecFoo, it may still fail when passed data from your peer that uses this other library), but the bandwidth requirements means that you now have to deal with trying to directly connect these two clients despite any silent NAT or firewall that may be hidden around. Jingle provided its NAT-traversal algorithm, but even that required network support in the form of "superservers" for when all else failed.
All the nerds here only think about standards etc. Don't forget whatsapp is a company and it has to protect its market. Without controlling all the clients, whatsapp is worth a lot less.
Why does controlling the clients make it worth more? One of the articles key points was that it shut down good 3rd party clients and replaced them with a bad 1st party client. Controlling the clients is only a good move if you use that control to make better clients.
By that logic any e-mail service should be incompatible with the rest, but that's clearly idiotic and no one would try arguing it. Try also imagining that your mobile carrier would tell you that by no means you are allowed to call to users of another carrier, since that would not "protect their market". Would you ever use such? When it comes to instant messaging however some lose common sense and start thinking that dark ages approach is acceptable.
When communication service instead of enhancing communication tries to hinder it by intentionally gutting interoperability, one should avoid it like a plague.
You are comparing two different things. Email is a generic concept - it's not proprietary . A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message.
Basically, if we push your analysis further, Facebook, which is a communication application, should let you send a message to your twitter account, that you could read with twitter, and reply with a comment on an Instagram picture. That'd be the same thing - I mean, they are all "messages" somehow, aren't they? See, it's - as you say - clearly idiotic as no one would open its platform that much.
> Email is a generic concept - it's not proprietary
Concepts can't be proprietary altogether. You can't own ideas. Instant messaging isn't proprietary either.
> A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message.
If you are talking about certain implementation of ideas being proprietary - that's exactly the point of my original comment. Making it intentionally incompatible to "control the market" is crooked lock-in tactic. Which is especially the case with Whatsapp which internally uses XMPP which was designed for interoperability and as IETF standard.
And I brought examples with e-mail. A long time ago Compuserve and AOL e-mail services used to be incompatible on purpose. But pressure from users to end that stupidity forced them to reconsider. There is no valid reason that a lot of IM services can't interoperate to a good degree. Except for greed and backwards thinking.
