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.
> 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users.
Shit, Hangouts itself is an unreliable message delivery system. [0]
At least once an month in both group chats and one-on-one chats I will get messages that seem out of context. Somewhere between many minutes and an hour later, the messages between the OOC one and the previous [1] message will silently appear. The "new" messages are inserted between the previous and OOC message, and bear timestamps that make it look as if they were never missing.
I've even had this happen while I had the conversation in question open in the damn client! It's super-fun to see ten or so "new" messages slide in between two already-delivered ones. :/
So, if you've ever wondering if you had a brain fart and overlooked an important message in Hangouts, you may very well have not!
[0] Yep, I'm using the latest software.
[1] Previous at the time I received the out of context message.
Hangouts/google voice have been really bad in this regard for me. Lots of sms drops a year or so ago. No message drops in a while but constant notification drops getting me in trouble.
This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.
I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS, i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one experiencing this Hangouts problem [0]. The lady friend thinks I'm nuts.
Speaking of SMS, when I lived in the American Southeast, I occasionally had SMS messages from friends be delivered months late.
Neither Hangouts nor SMS are the messaging systems of the future. :P If Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't gain traction, maybe we need a super-sexy frontend over top of email.
What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).
My wife and I have gone back to emailing each other (from our phones) because we have periodic issues with massively delayed text messages (e.g. ~7PM "ETA?", reply "30 minutes", delivery of that reply ~1:30AM). Some of that's likely due to flakiness of her (old, but has a keyboard!) phone, but regardless of that email moves right through.
Ahhhh that'll explain never receiving messages and my friends not getting them. Some bust scenarios I experience:
1. I will call my wife using Hangouts - she won't be notified on her phone.
2. I chat with someone via Google Talk on my old phone - if they're using Hangouts, they may or may not receive the message.
3. Someone will chat with me via Hangouts. My phone with Google Talk may or may not receive it; BUT! if I open the web browser version on a laptop, it'll receive it (and makes me look like an ignorant weirdo when I reply to messages that have been "there" for days...
Mobile hangouts to mobile hangouts mostly works (apart from the video call at intermittent times). Oddly, the Hangouts client will say that the person was not available for a video call (ie, they didn't pick up) but they didn't receive any alert or ANYTHING to state that there was a call coming in.
No offence to the team there, but it's a piece of junk. Video calling and voice calling and text all worked fine under Google Talk; under Hangouts, I might as well be putting messages in bottles and hoping they will reach the destination...
Even MSN Messenger was more reliable, and that was 15+ years ago; I am not sure how this is not a solved problem! (Not sure if they've fixed the lack of online/offline presence in Hangouts yet; if not, it is STUPID. "Are you there?" Who knows!)
Long before I hangouts I had lots of issues with Google talk. I started numbering my messages as in
1 Hey Joe
2 How are things in SG
3 Are you going to meet me at the airport?
4 Or shall I take a cab?
5 In any case I'll be into the city by 7pm so we can grab dinner
etc.
What we found was that Google talk was dropping messages. Lots of them.
With no way to complain and no way to prove it I just stopped using Google Talk. It was really disappointing to see it do so poorly though. Like most of the rest of you it seemed like chat was a solved issue.
What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore.
Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.
Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.
Sean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.
There are just too many different proprietary IM protocols, and they are often fast moving targets. You can't keep up with a team of Google engineers tweaking their protocol every day.
Have a look at WhatsApp, there was a bunch of efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, and they ended up non-working, abandoned or C&Ded [0]
I've seen a radical effect on the usage Talk due to this.
Only my tech-savvy friends would use Google Talk previously and the others would use Facebook. Since the push from Google to use Hangout, nobody I know is using Hangout or Google Talk anymore and it looks like everyone switched to Facebook/Whatsapp on my contact list. I don't even open the chat anymore.
My rant, apart from all your valid points is that they don't support half of XMPP extensions, including offline messages. So if someone writes to you while offline, you only get an inbox notification in Gmail.
Why IRC isn't the foundation for all chat I still don't know. I assume a lot of the typical workflow (logging in, choosing a nick) can be automated for users who don't care to know what chat protocol they are using.
Because it fails to satisfy so many modern demands. It doesn't even understand user names that aren't a subset of ASCII. Most of the commands aren't really standardized. It doesn't support end-to-end encryption (which today even WhatsApp is using). It requires you to be always connected instead of using push notification systems which are way better for the battery of mobile devices.
Probably the only reason the protocol is still around is that it's popular among a certain group. IRC is so different from what you would want from a modern chat system that it doesn't make much sense to build upon it.
The problem right now is persistent connections on iOS. You need to use push messages instead, which requires a plugin on the jabber server and a matching client.
Not something you can expect all your friends to set up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).
I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service, but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.
You are so right. I really wanted XMPP to succeed and I used in happily back in 2002 or so. But it just doesn't seem to have evolved at all. You pretty much nailed it with persistent group chat and shared chat history. Skype can really get on my nerves, but it had this covered since forever, and trying to get people on XMPP without equivalent features is hopeless.
I used to use Skype for persistent, cross-platform group chat with my close group of friends. But we recently switched to using Slack, and it's far better.
The only thing that's missing, is end-to-end encryption.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if you're being ironic about JSON. Note that jkarneges, who comments elsewhere in this thread, is the creator of Psi [1], arguably the best XMPP-focused messaging client.
The value/burden of XML has always been a topic of debate for XMPP. In retrospect, I think it contributed to its lack of appeal, though the extensibility and readbility (ehm, arguably) it provided were unique back then.
I've long wondered about which alternative base protocols could be used in place. JSON is OK, but may be as much a fad as XML. I've wondered if ASN.1 could be used, but ProtoBufs sound like they're a better fit [2] in that they're simpler, more space-efficient, and backwards-and-forwards compatible (and thus extensible, XMPP's main feature) In fact, it's what Google already uses themselves.
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.
Maybe we need a new standard JSON protocol, I bet part of it falling out of favor was the XML.
Messaging is one of those areas that is actually pretty simple that corporations that want to own channels have munged up pretty bad into a complex mess. Companies internally even have a couple or few.
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.
I was thinking about this recently. After having some trouble with my iPhone 5 sending SMS's last year and my Nexus 6 sending and receiving MMS's this year I feel that SMS/MMS reliability has gotten really bad. I know it's due to a cocktail of buggy OS's and the cell phone towers themselves but I never thought my old Motorola flip-phone from 10 years ago would be more reliable than this stuff.
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.
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.
...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.
I would love this for Windows. I've missed a Windows client since Trillian/Pidgin couldn't keep up with proprietary features, and Facebook discontinued its own messenger application.
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.
-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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!).
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Probably the part where they're not locking you in their network by way of convenience. Forcing you to use their homepage (FB) or browser (Hangounts) and preventing you form using unified messengers gives their other services exposure and makes users advertise/annoy friends to join their chat service.
Much like Apple is doing with the "green bubble" shaming on their keynotes.
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.
Can you link to the example? I've been interested in doing something like this, but as far as I can tell, you can only read messages using the Graph API; there's no method for sending messages.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
jabber.org doesn't accept new registrations since 2013.
If you're looking for a public XMPP server to register an account at there is a (no longer updated) list of Jabber servers at https://xmpp.net/directory.php and a more up to date list at https://list.jabber.at.
You can register an account any public XMPP server at https://conversejs.org (via the chat client in the bottom right).
Incidentally, I run the conversejs.org server which is open to registrations.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users.
Shit, Hangouts itself is an unreliable message delivery system. [0]
At least once an month in both group chats and one-on-one chats I will get messages that seem out of context. Somewhere between many minutes and an hour later, the messages between the OOC one and the previous [1] message will silently appear. The "new" messages are inserted between the previous and OOC message, and bear timestamps that make it look as if they were never missing.
I've even had this happen while I had the conversation in question open in the damn client! It's super-fun to see ten or so "new" messages slide in between two already-delivered ones. :/
So, if you've ever wondering if you had a brain fart and overlooked an important message in Hangouts, you may very well have not!
[0] Yep, I'm using the latest software.
[1] Previous at the time I received the out of context message.
Hangouts/google voice have been really bad in this regard for me. Lots of sms drops a year or so ago. No message drops in a while but constant notification drops getting me in trouble.
I used to have this problem and it was something really stupid, like the local clock's time being wrong.
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I stopped using hangouts with Google voice because messages were only infrequently delivered.
This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.
I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS, i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one experiencing this Hangouts problem [0]. The lady friend thinks I'm nuts.
Speaking of SMS, when I lived in the American Southeast, I occasionally had SMS messages from friends be delivered months late.
Neither Hangouts nor SMS are the messaging systems of the future. :P If Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't gain traction, maybe we need a super-sexy frontend over top of email.
[0] Looks like we were concurrently writing up our experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267147
What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).
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My wife and I have gone back to emailing each other (from our phones) because we have periodic issues with massively delayed text messages (e.g. ~7PM "ETA?", reply "30 minutes", delivery of that reply ~1:30AM). Some of that's likely due to flakiness of her (old, but has a keyboard!) phone, but regardless of that email moves right through.
Its not XMPP that's the problem, its Google Hangouts. Google Talk didn't drop messages (and its the one using XMPP).
Ahhhh that'll explain never receiving messages and my friends not getting them. Some bust scenarios I experience:
1. I will call my wife using Hangouts - she won't be notified on her phone.
2. I chat with someone via Google Talk on my old phone - if they're using Hangouts, they may or may not receive the message.
3. Someone will chat with me via Hangouts. My phone with Google Talk may or may not receive it; BUT! if I open the web browser version on a laptop, it'll receive it (and makes me look like an ignorant weirdo when I reply to messages that have been "there" for days...
Mobile hangouts to mobile hangouts mostly works (apart from the video call at intermittent times). Oddly, the Hangouts client will say that the person was not available for a video call (ie, they didn't pick up) but they didn't receive any alert or ANYTHING to state that there was a call coming in.
No offence to the team there, but it's a piece of junk. Video calling and voice calling and text all worked fine under Google Talk; under Hangouts, I might as well be putting messages in bottles and hoping they will reach the destination...
Even MSN Messenger was more reliable, and that was 15+ years ago; I am not sure how this is not a solved problem! (Not sure if they've fixed the lack of online/offline presence in Hangouts yet; if not, it is STUPID. "Are you there?" Who knows!)
Long before I hangouts I had lots of issues with Google talk. I started numbering my messages as in
1 Hey Joe
2 How are things in SG
3 Are you going to meet me at the airport?
4 Or shall I take a cab?
5 In any case I'll be into the city by 7pm so we can grab dinner
etc.
What we found was that Google talk was dropping messages. Lots of them.
With no way to complain and no way to prove it I just stopped using Google Talk. It was really disappointing to see it do so poorly though. Like most of the rest of you it seemed like chat was a solved issue.
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I still wonder when https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications will go away.
What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore.
Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.
Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.
Sean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.
There are just too many different proprietary IM protocols, and they are often fast moving targets. You can't keep up with a team of Google engineers tweaking their protocol every day.
Have a look at WhatsApp, there was a bunch of efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, and they ended up non-working, abandoned or C&Ded [0]
[0] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI/issues/83
I've seen a radical effect on the usage Talk due to this.
Only my tech-savvy friends would use Google Talk previously and the others would use Facebook. Since the push from Google to use Hangout, nobody I know is using Hangout or Google Talk anymore and it looks like everyone switched to Facebook/Whatsapp on my contact list. I don't even open the chat anymore.
My rant, apart from all your valid points is that they don't support half of XMPP extensions, including offline messages. So if someone writes to you while offline, you only get an inbox notification in Gmail.
Why IRC isn't the foundation for all chat I still don't know. I assume a lot of the typical workflow (logging in, choosing a nick) can be automated for users who don't care to know what chat protocol they are using.
Because it fails to satisfy so many modern demands. It doesn't even understand user names that aren't a subset of ASCII. Most of the commands aren't really standardized. It doesn't support end-to-end encryption (which today even WhatsApp is using). It requires you to be always connected instead of using push notification systems which are way better for the battery of mobile devices.
Probably the only reason the protocol is still around is that it's popular among a certain group. IRC is so different from what you would want from a modern chat system that it doesn't make much sense to build upon it.
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NetSplit? Intermittent network disconnect and suddenly ghosts? No delivery reports? No read tickets?
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.
The problem right now is persistent connections on iOS. You need to use push messages instead, which requires a plugin on the jabber server and a matching client.
Not something you can expect all your friends to set up.
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i suggested this because i believe xmpp to be superior to irc.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> ... persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statuses....
Across all my devices - Web, Linux, Android and FirefoxOS. No advertising.
Telegram - http://telegram.org
I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).
I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service, but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.
[0] https://jaconda.im [1] http://webcalldirect.com
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You are so right. I really wanted XMPP to succeed and I used in happily back in 2002 or so. But it just doesn't seem to have evolved at all. You pretty much nailed it with persistent group chat and shared chat history. Skype can really get on my nerves, but it had this covered since forever, and trying to get people on XMPP without equivalent features is hopeless.
I used to use Skype for persistent, cross-platform group chat with my close group of friends. But we recently switched to using Slack, and it's far better.
The only thing that's missing, is end-to-end encryption.
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.
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1339782 add me
Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/
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. :)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
It's worth noting that XMPP was based on XML. New hotness is JSON, or maybe even compressed binary protocols.
I don't know if you're being ironic about JSON. Note that jkarneges, who comments elsewhere in this thread, is the creator of Psi [1], arguably the best XMPP-focused messaging client.
The value/burden of XML has always been a topic of debate for XMPP. In retrospect, I think it contributed to its lack of appeal, though the extensibility and readbility (ehm, arguably) it provided were unique back then.
I've long wondered about which alternative base protocols could be used in place. JSON is OK, but may be as much a fad as XML. I've wondered if ASN.1 could be used, but ProtoBufs sound like they're a better fit [2] in that they're simpler, more space-efficient, and backwards-and-forwards compatible (and thus extensible, XMPP's main feature) In fact, it's what Google already uses themselves.
[1] http://psi-im.org/ [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/protobuf/eNAZlnPKVW4
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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.
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Maybe we need a new standard JSON protocol, I bet part of it falling out of favor was the XML.
Messaging is one of those areas that is actually pretty simple that corporations that want to own channels have munged up pretty bad into a complex mess. Companies internally even have a couple or few.
Side note: AOL/Timewarner actually owns the IM patent from ICQ (http://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/12/19/internet.aol....)
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> 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.
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.
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Not much good for talking to people on things that aren't phones.
I was thinking about this recently. After having some trouble with my iPhone 5 sending SMS's last year and my Nexus 6 sending and receiving MMS's this year I feel that SMS/MMS reliability has gotten really bad. I know it's due to a cocktail of buggy OS's and the cell phone towers themselves but I never thought my old Motorola flip-phone from 10 years ago would be more reliable than this stuff.
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.
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.
It all reminds me of this post: 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.
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.
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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.
...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...
This is a 11-month old announcement:
Everybody loves open standards until they are large enough to dictate their own.
Alternative to your desktop client.
http://www.goofyapp.com/
I would love this for Windows. I've missed a Windows client since Trillian/Pidgin couldn't keep up with proprietary features, and Facebook discontinued its own messenger application.
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 ;)
Hangouts new chrome extension, the one with float circles, it's pretty good, and works on Linux.
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Whatsapp has a web client.
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Awesome, thanks! I was just looking for something like this today! :)
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.
Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used?
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
>-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).
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.
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.
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.
That sucks, I really liked using Pidgin/Adium with Facebook chat.
I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page:
http://hnrankings.info/9266769/
Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?
Probably the fact that it was announced last April
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.
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.
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.
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A long time ago I worked on the modified ejabberd servers that provide this service. A shame indeed.
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?
I'd love to hear that story if you have the time...
I wish the entire Messenger went away - nothing but an extra FB annoyance forced onto me.
Turn off chat. Nothing is forced onto you.
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/
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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://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page
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...
Can you link to the offending conversation?
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036550
Read through this (with showdead on) for a bunch of links about tox and the pro/contra tox trolling that happened...
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?
The part where when you're using XMPP you're not on their website looking at their ads.
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.
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.
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.
Probably the part where they're not locking you in their network by way of convenience. Forcing you to use their homepage (FB) or browser (Hangounts) and preventing you form using unified messengers gives their other services exposure and makes users advertise/annoy friends to join their chat service.
Much like Apple is doing with the "green bubble" shaming on their keynotes.
So this is how they make it a platform? :)
Is there any other way to work with Facebook Chat, now that XMPP is gone?
Directly via the graph api. Simpler than xmpp.
Someone recently posted a graph api chat example.
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:
You get this even if you try to use the Graph API Explorer tool to view /me/threads.
Do we know if Adium/pidgin are likely to update to use that API, or is it too early to say?
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Can you link to the example? I've been interested in doing something like this, but as far as I can tell, you can only read messages using the Graph API; there's no method for sending messages.
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.)
Supposedly this?
https://github.com/jgeboski/bitlbee-facebook
I think this one already uses the Graph API directly.
This looks very good, did someone try it out?
Another stab between the shoulder blades for those of us who like to live in the command line.
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.
I would be also interested in Messenger integration in Adium (It uses same library as Pidgin.).
Considering that they never opened it to federation, does it even matter?
Desktop XMPP clients can no longer be used to chat on FB. That matters to me.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722
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.
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[7] https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber
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)
Let's hope for an official desktop client of Messenger...
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!
Another one turns sour. But FB server was never federated anyway, so good riddance.
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.
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.
jabber.org doesn't accept new registrations since 2013.
If you're looking for a public XMPP server to register an account at there is a (no longer updated) list of Jabber servers at https://xmpp.net/directory.php and a more up to date list at https://list.jabber.at.
You can register an account any public XMPP server at https://conversejs.org (via the chat client in the bottom right).
Incidentally, I run the conversejs.org server which is open to registrations.
> 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.
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?
I think jabber.org is indeed overloaded and they don't accept new registrations since 2013.
See my answer to the GP about available servers.
pidgin, for all the flak it and libpurple gets, and huge backlog of feature requests and bugs, does a reasonably good job for me.