Comment by hengheng

11 years ago

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.

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hengheng

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phillc73  11 years ago

> ... 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

  • fencepost  11 years ago

    My biggest concern with things like this is that AFAICT their business model is kind of foggy. Quoting from their FAQ, "Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we'll invite our users to donate and add nonessential paid options to break even. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram." https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...

    That's a very nice sentiment, but it's not a sentiment that fills me with confidence that I can rely on the continued existence of the free thing they're giving me.

  • dancsi  11 years ago

    Wow, Telegram looks great! Now if I only could convince all of my friends to switch...

pjtr  11 years ago

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.

ozmbie  11 years ago

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.

click170  11 years ago

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.

  • christop  11 years ago

    In addition to logging as mentioned, I find that file transfers (encrypted!) that Just Work between users regardless of the network/client/server used seems to be missing.

    I really like XMPP, and the extensibility it has is brilliant, but at the same time leads to a crazy level of fragmentation for the instant messaging use case. You're basically guaranteed that you can chat to others and maintain a buddy list, but anything much beyond that is a toss up, depending on the server used, how it's configured, and what client each user has.

  • hengheng  11 years ago

    Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.

    • rakoo  11 years ago

      If you're talking about Multi-User Chats, then on entering a room the server should send previous messages (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html#enter-history), with no requirements set in stone (except when the client specifies a maximum amoun to send).

      When a client logs in, it is true that a server doesn't have to send messages back, but that's the goal of XEP-0313.

    • click170  11 years ago

      I haven't heard of an extension that does that either, but I'm not sure that would scale well for busy long-running Multi User Chats.

      But the benefit of XMPP is that a new extension can be proposed that does this if enough people want such a feature. Personally I would argue that a better approach would be to make Public MUC logs accessible and searchable via a web interface and to have the client log chats going forward from when they join (with offline messaging from the server so you don't have to be online the whole time).

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