That comment reads like reflex than anything with much though put behind it: "Google is closing a service", "Google is new the Microsoft" the same tired cliche.
First of all it's far form an unexpected announcement seeing as they have been developing another payment service in paralleled, and second "monopoly" is a specific legal term, it shouldn't thrown around lightly, it's not just another synonym for "big".
As for your points:
1) Great things could come out from experimentation so it's a new positive and by definition most of those experiments will fail, you can't really be any sort of a self respected tech company if you shun experimentation.
2) This is anecdotal, they have a selection of core products and when a preferential one gets deprecated it's done through a reasonable process as spelled out in that post.
They've always archived non-"off the record" chats, difference is that controlling archiving behavior is no longer done by client rather via a new web interface at: https://mail.google.com/mail/#chats
Hyperbole aside (they won’t drop SMTP) that is a very narrow and unfair view on the situation, they at least tried for years to make it work with these standards and failed.
They were obviously the last ones doing so, and this new approach is mainly about modernising their infrastructure.
Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP?
Google was the last one standing, and it just didn't work out.
And why cherry pick “standards”? how about web standard? Chromium is a very big commitment to them.
Edit: I should be more specific as I meant a federated implementation of XMPP.
Lync's native protocol is SIP, a standard that Google could also have adopted years ago, but they went with the more modern and 'better' competing XMPP standard.
Microsoft went through a lot of problems implementing SIP it for Lync and its predecessors LCS and OCS, but they remained within the standard and worked on interoperability and improving the standard around security, even if it took more time than going it alone.
The roles of Microsoft and Google have certainly switched around.
To be fair, while the Office suite itself is pretty decent these days, Office 365 is terrible. Microsoft is still very much a software company and not a services company.
Coincidentally, only yesterday I installed an XMPP daemon on one of my servers and configured it as a message relay so I can send and receive SMS from my PC via my phone.
Facebook chat also uses XMPP.
So in answer to your question: yes, there are people still building new stuff on top of XMPP.
However I will concede that I'm also a bit IRC advocate - so I'm probably the wrong person to comment on the best newest social protocols.
No one is taking xmpp away from your server or the applications that are using it; but take Facebook: did they do any effort of integrating their chat with the Gmail one?
You're missing my point. The previous poster stated that nobody was using XMPP and I was simply stating that wasn't true.
I'm not worried that Google might someone how hack into my server and kill XMPP on that, nor am I commenting on the level of the Facebook Chat integration with the wider XMPP community (in fact the reason I run my own XMPP server was to have a private channel, so I can completely understand why Facebook have chosen to do so as well).
My comment was just stating that XMPP is still widely used - despite other peoples claims that Google were it's only supporters.
The SMS thing? It's basically just an Android app (gtalksms [1]). But I wanted a private encrypted network to control it from (I actually go further and then hook the XMPP server into bitlbee which is an IRC server for IM clients. So now I can control my phone, Twitter, Facebook Chat and Windows Messenger all from Irssi.
> Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP?
I use XMPP to talk with Google Talk users from an XMPP account hosted on my own server. I will be annoyed if Google users are driven away from Google Talk to something that I cannot interact with unless I use a Google account.
Same here; and it's not like it's hard. If you're running a web server and/or DNS, it's as easy as 'apt-get install ejabberd', tweak some well documented settings in the config file, add a few lines to the DNS config, and bam! I'm talking to my friends on GTalk via my own private XMPP server.
Other than a basic understanding of what it is, I don't know anything about XMPP. What's wrong with it? Or, more specifically, what does it do poorly that other things have eclipsed?
It is federated in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to establish new features, as there are a multitude of servers and clients, which would all have to support said new features for them to stick.
Some see that as an advantage, but it definitely doesn’t help ‘innovate’ and re-invent the wheel every other month. GPG encryption, for example, while standardised in XEP-something, is still not really supported in widely available clients. OTR encryption is more of a layer atop the actual protocol and hence somewhat inelegant (and also not that widely available).
Also it’s XML-based, which could be argued is even worse than base64, but that should be a rather small concern given how popular JSON and the likes are nowadays.
But Google, as a wealthy company and the controller of such a big chunk of the XMPP user base, was (maybe uniquely) in a good position to overcome these problems. It could have established a de facto standard set of supported features, and maybe pushed out some code to help clients implement awkward bits of it.
Serious question: how practical is it to build something like Hangouts that is meant to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber etc on top of XMPP? is it even possible?
Yes there is. The maemo/meego community reverse engineered it and created a proof-of-concept java app, and a totally working meego app for the N9. Check their forum for protocol info, etc, but there's clearly enough to create a desktop app (you'll still need a phone to create the account though).
Why is it not utilized more widely then? foregoing for a minute that everyone is cultivating their own gardens - what are the weaknesses of XMPP that would make it so easily avoidable for most of these apps?
It's definitely not the lack of features, since XMPP is extendable. I've heard that the protocol is quite chatty and would cause power drain on phones. That could probably be solved with a binary serialization alternative to XML, though.
Yeah, there's http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html which discusses some ways to mitigate the power issue, but, from what I understand, we never got much feedback from mobile developers about it. In particular there are several extensions which remove the need for a lot of network traffic (capability hashes, roster versioning, stream management to immediately resume a session that got disconnected, etc). The fun part is that 1) a lot of mobile client developers haven't implemented those and 2) most require server support, and Google never added support for them.
While the use of XML in the protocol might be considered verbose, stream-level compression from TLS quite makes up for that. With many contacts, the number of presence stanzas might indeed drain the battery because the antenna will be 'up' quite a bit.
However, the XMPP community has been active in quantifying such issues and providing solutions. The beginning of a document with background information is available as http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html. There are also various opinions on the topic to be found online, like http://www.deepdarc.com/2008/02/14/mobile-xmpp/, that, as you can see, dates back half a decade already.
The only thing Google actually did fro mobile XMPP was google:queue, which bunches together presence updates such that the antenna efficiency is improved dramatically.
Facebook also have a private extension, as I understand things.
I should actually submit that extension - I wrote it up as a XEP ages back, but various things have held it up.
Yes, it is. The very start of a session is usually synchronous (authentication, etc), but after that it is async. Request/response commands have an id value to link the request to the response so it doesn't matter if other data arrives first.
There are no weaknesses in XMPP. The issue are the protocols on the side, the ones that do video and voice. XMPP allows to chat and create a voice/video session, but:
1) the free protocols to do voice and video are not as good as the proprietary ones
2) it seems that every client use a different set of protocols for video and chat
That extension is essentially broken (running iceWM), as the text input box dips below the taskbar. Furthermore, it requires chrome to be open. I don't necessarily want to keep my browser open at all times, nor do I care to use my browser as a chat client. (Also, what happens if switch to some non-standard browser? There is no way that my choice of browser should impact my ability to chat.)
I'm trying to stay open-minded, but so far I really dislike this product. I hope gtalk stays open.
I think the Chrome app is an excellent cross platform solution (written once, easily maintainable). As for the protocol I don't think it is practical or even possible to built this sort of all encompassing communications platform on top of XMPP (see the competition).
I think the chrome app is one aspect of a cross-platform solution. But what if I'd like to chat without opening chrome?
I'll cross my fingers for a Hangouts API that allows me to write a standalone client. However, if chatting through a semi-broken browser extension (or memory intensive gmail tab) are my only options, then I guess the service isn't for me. I think the reason I'm annoyed is that I have a lot of important contacts on gtalk, so migrating away will be a challenge.
I know change is inevitable, that the service is free, and that they want to offer a better product. Perhaps my use cases are just too expensive to support in the long run.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google Talk to remain indefinitely though - if you need XMPP you at least want an exit strategy if Hangouts isn't suitable. It's quite telling that the Hangouts app on Android is called "Hangouts (replaces Talk)" and takes Talk's URL in the play store.
Despite the clear warning signs, I am willing to put money on people whinging in a year or two when they shut down those servers, just like everyone got all upset about Reader.
Plenty of federated XMPP servers, true, but unlike Reader, XMPP requires other users on federated servers to be useful. Since the Reader brouhaha I'd been considering moving away from GApps back to hosting my own mail and xmpp. Now Google has made the XMPP side of that worthless, 87% of my IM contacts use G(Mail|Talk), and will switch to Hangouts.
Will GTalk be able to communicate to users of Hangouts, though, or will everyone be forced over to Hangouts in order to continue to speak to the people who move over? I'm guessing the latter.
Yes, for now they're basically the same service. I'd imagine that this will change as Hangouts diverges more and more from what Talk supports, to the point where Talk will be killed due to disuse.
don't expect that to last too long. the google talk android app updates to become hangouts, and the chrome extension became hangouts automatically today.
