>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication.<p>Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems <i>worse</i> now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revision.
We already have open standards for unified communication: H.323 (old), XMPP and SIP.<p>Also there are a lot of companies using and/or offering great software based on these open protocols: check Asterisk (<a href="http://www.asterisk.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.asterisk.org/</a>) or Mizutech full stack offer (<a href="http://www.mizu-voip.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mizu-voip.com/</a>).<p>There is only one problem: When VoIP companies grows, all of them are switching to (at least partially) proprietary protocols.<p>There is a big hype now around Twilio. However there were apps like that even before solving the same problem. For example mizutech SIP webphone also has a nice javascript API and it is completely SIP compatible (without the need to use any third party obfuscating cloud service like in the case of Twilio. It will just connect directly to any SIP server ...without the cloud hype).<p>It just seems that technology or open protocols doesn't matter too much. The winner solution was and always will be the solution offered by the company with better marketing.
Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious.<p>WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are moving off of WhatsApp and end up (back?) with Skype, Threema, Telegram, Hangout, Facebook. No, not TextSecure. That's generally unknown all around me.<p>Out of these services I hate Skype, Hangout and Facebook with a passion. I like the Telegram marketing, but I'm skeptical and .. probably won't ever use it. Threema is the closed [1] thing I would consider, but even that is a compromise I'm not going to make.<p>For a long time now I'm telling my friends to 'just email me, or call'. Yes, I do use mail like IM all the time. It works, while all of the products above don't - for my definition of 'works'.<p>edit:
1: I meant 'closest', but 'closed' is such a good typo in that case - I'll leave it in. It's both.
It's odd that, despite there being an open protocol for realtime chat that is over 25 years old, older than HTTP or HTML, I would guess that the majority of the population hasn't heard of or used it. On the other hand, almost everyone has heard of and uses email, which also dates from around the same time period.<p>> A unified communication service would not only allow me to communicate easily on any device it makes sense to, it would also unify the 3 main communication formats into one platform: voice, video, and messaging.<p>The closest to that seems to be SIP and its related protocols, but they don't seem all that popular for some reason.
Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could only email, message and communicate members within each service.<p>Back to the future...
I just want to point out that our current internet is not http-based. It's ip-based. The World Wide Web is http-based but that's not the same as the Internet.<p>This would be nit-picking, except it's not. There <i>is</i> a global unified standard for communication. It's called the Internet Protocol (ip for short). If we moved SMS messages off SMS and onto ip we have WhatsApp (or any other superficially similar service). If you want to stop using SMS because it doesn't work over ip, then there are a few dozen messaging apps that will run on your phone and allow you to send and receive messages over ip. This, after all, was the driver behind WhatsApp's growth: the data bandwidth involved in sending a message is massively cheaper than SMS charges for the same message.<p>A single google search revealed a whole page allowing you to send and receive SMS messages from iPad or desktop if that's the problem.<p>So, basically, as far as I can see it's not the networks preventing this. It's the users. Stop sending SMS messages and urge all your friends to move to any one of a dozen non-SMS message formats and you're done.
We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity:<p>0) Acknowledge there is a problem.<p>1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end encryption for <i>ALL</i> major OSes (Mobile + Desktop).<p>2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it (without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising.<p>3)-5) Repeat for Voice.<p>6)-8) Repeat for Video.<p>Right now we're still at step 0) with TextSecure being the most promising at reaching 1). Each subsequent step becomes less and less likely to succeed, so I wouldn't bet any money that we have anything like that in the future. Maybe if MS released Skype as Open Source (which doesn't seem so unlikely anymore after yesterday's news).
It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.
If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.
How about the web as a communication platform? Check out awesometalk.com for video, for example. No need to install anything, besides a compatible browser, of course :)
I don't use apps. Does that make me a grandpa? I'm under 30. Too much coffee for this guy.<p>The last paragraph is cool, and I can visualize a day when you just want to contact someone async... or not in any medium and not have to worry about the network. The rant was pointless though.