Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts<p>Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is:<p>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"<p>2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them).<p>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).<p>Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and be done with it.
A quick comment on why I submitted this ...<p>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.<p>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.
<i>Sigh</i>, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned.<p>Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?
Zuckerberg sure has been interesting this week:<p>> Developers please use our platform!<p>> Developers we are now going to obsolete any work you've done with the XMPP front-end.<p>Demonstrating a clear moving target is not how you attract developers, Facebook.
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.<p>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.
This is a 11-month old announcement:<p><pre><code> On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API
as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.</code></pre>
quick, deprecate all the things that are open.<p>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.<p>This model always end up being bad for the masses of course, and only good for a few.
Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used?<p><a href="https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt</a><p>-based on open standards (SIP)<p>-supported by most VoIP servers (so we have full interoperability between vendors such as Cisco, Huawei, Siemens, Voipswitch, Mizutech, Jitsi and others)<p>-simple and extendable<p>-lots of free services, free/open source software. You can also host your own or integrate into your company PBX<p>In the previous years, we always see the same path for messaging applications:<p>1. Startup company add messaging based on open standards (SIP/IRC/XMPP/other?)<p>2. One the company has significant user base, switches to a non-standard / proprietary protocol<p>Already happened for Skype, Yahoo, Google, Facebook
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.
I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page:<p><a href="http://hnrankings.info/9266769/" rel="nofollow">http://hnrankings.info/9266769/</a><p>Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?
IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better.<p>Why does a system with the following features not exist:<p>1. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol<p>2. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a
server )<p>3. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or the like ) and some web language ( Python & Dynamic JS )<p>3b. Has a free open source server reference implementation<p>4. Logging on the server indefinitely<p>5. Is always encrypted ( end to end via public keys, so that clear data never
reaches the servers )<p>6. Offline messaging<p>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... )<p>8. Random chat<p>9. Group chat<p>10. Utf8 for full multi-lingual use<p>11. Index of users for finding other users<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[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!).<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber" rel="nofollow">http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page</a>
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?
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.
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.<p>That'll be all.<p>--<p>[7] <a href="https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber" rel="nofollow">https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber</a>
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)
Welp, time to register an account on jabber.org<p>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.