Comment by jonalmeida
11 years ago
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.