Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging

by thisisparker • 13 years ago

677 196 13 years ago

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

As a Googler (who does not work on Hangsout) my own personal opinion is that I fully agree with the EFF here:

"In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols."

I hope the specs at some point are opened. The Hangouts team probably has good reason at the moment to strictly focus on a core set of functionality and get it working with good UX on all the platforms. People are complaining that stuff like voice calling, and some Talk features are missing, but it's probably due to focus on shipping something that works good first. It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember using reverse engineered Java libraries that could talk to these services.

Google Wave was done in the opposite way, as was Open Social. They came with specs, but they did not focus on core user experience in the beginning. It's hard to win with open specs without getting consumer traction.

deepblueocean• 13 years ago

I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol, in which case it's _already_ an open standard. What would be awfully nice is if Google (which is a category mistake - what I really mean is "the Hangouts team") would clarify this, release any updates to the protocol that they've made, and perhaps define something more than the weak API provided for the current Hangouts platform.

In particular, the right test of openness is this: can I build an interoperable client that could participate in a Hangout as a first-class entity?

saraid2164• 13 years ago

> I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol

I've never heard this. Do you have anything that backs you up? I found a Quora answer that says that the Hangouts API is based on the the Wave API, but that's it.

josephg• 13 years ago

As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML).

That way lies madness.

drivebyacct24• 13 years ago

Where oh where oh where did you get that idea?

spankalee2• 13 years ago

As another Googler, I mostly agree with you, but I also sympathize with the product and engineering teams.

They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use.

Sure Hangouts could publish their protocol like Wave did, but Wave was a complex mess of different protocol formats and transports and publishing that as a "standard" was way premature. Who knows how good the current Hangout protocols are, or how well they might play with real standards like WebRTC. It's probably too early for them

I remain optimistic that these things can be standardized in the future.

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

I agree with you, history is pretty much full of committee designed specs that failed, but full of defacto standards from commercially successful products that are later standardized.

A lot of the features, like group video calling, first need their use cases polished by user trial, then hopefully, they can be implemented on top of either existing standards, provide inputs to change those standards to satisfy the requirements.

OpenID/OAuth is an instructive example. The specs were built very much driven by committee oriented thinking, and the resulting UX implementations out of the gate were much more complicated than the Facebook Connect experience. I think actually focusing on the "design" aspect of how users use it, and then extracting the relevant technical requirements into a spec works better.

rjzzleep• 13 years ago

i'm sorry i fail to see the argument. it's perfectly fine to have your own proprietary format, but publish the specs so others can interact with it. who said anything about ietf having to sign it off.

cube13• 13 years ago

Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Google needs to bring WebRTC with VP9 and Opus to Hangouts already!

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

> They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use.

But the only feature that matters in a messaging app is knowing the person you want to contact also uses the app. In this case by choosing to "innovate fast" they are guaranteeing failure.

greggman• 13 years ago

Wave was built on XMPP wasn't it? If I understand correctly XMPP is fully extensible which means Google can add whatever data they want and still be inter-operable with all the common parts and then define the new parts.

Video seems like it could be out of band using WebRTC and initiated by new XMPP data.

Watching the Wave introduction presentation from Google I/O 2009 it's hard to buy that a new protocol was needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

dserodio• 13 years ago

I'm not so optimistic. If their intention was to open and publish the protocol and specs, they'd announce this intention and avoid (or at least minimize) this PR backlash.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

I can sympathize with this notion, except that there are plenty of similar protocols that implement proprietary stuff on top of XMPP. Cisco UC, for example.

drivebyacct24• 13 years ago

I think this auto meme that "open standards" = "unable to innovate" is complete and utter hogwash.

Reminds of a project posted to HN a while back that had taken someone a month. I replicated it in the evening using all open source, open protocol components instead of being stubborn and falling prey to NIH syndrome.

bad_user6• 13 years ago

Here's how I see it ... my company is currently using Skype and for us Skype worked really well. By using Skype for example I can call any number in the U.S. for reasonable fees, something which Google doesn't allow me to do, since Google Voice is not available in my country. Skype's clients for my Android or for my Ubuntu laptop also work well.

Basically, Google is late. And the only thing that would make us switch to Google's alternatives would be an open protocol (not necessarily approved by a standards body, but at the very least with the specs published). That's because we don't trust Skype, but we would trust a protocol that has public specs. Even more than that, we would trust an open P2P protocol that wouldn't drop our connections to our list of contacts if your servers die.

And no, you won't win us by shoving that awful chat box down our throats, like in GMail or in Google+. You have to do more and be more than Skype currently is. Because you're late. And you won't win with consumers either, because consumers are already using Facebook's video chats, which is integrated with Skype. And you're late to the party all over the board, even though putting moustaches on people's faces is kind of cool.

Speaking of Skype and open P2P protocols, since Skype was acquired by Microsoft, want to bet that they'll up-yours on this one?

saraid2164• 13 years ago

I have to say I really do admire the way the EFF has taken to presuming that Google is a governmental body.

godgod3• 13 years ago

The EFF is correct. Google is in lock step with the US governments plans of the complete erosion of our privacy rights. Google knows a lot about us all and the feds want that info.

kps• 13 years ago

Where does the article conflate Google with a governmental body?

zmanian• 13 years ago

It always seems to be my look Google is heading in the direction of a WebRTC based messaging service/client and then suddenly the product group veers off into another direction. WebRTC has been nearly here for several years now but it does seem to arrive...

graue• 13 years ago

> It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL.

I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype, and to this day you can only call a Skype-using friend/colleague if you use the official, closed-source Skype client. So let's not be sanguine.

fryguy• 13 years ago

or the closed-source plugin with an API (skypekit.exe)

josteink3• 13 years ago

I hope you're right, but to my knowledge, this has never been done with Skype

It was done, but Skype has a rule about this which they apply quickly: Press the cease and desist button.

I've been using IM clients with support for skype, only to see it get dropped. Which makes it doubleplus sad that MSN (which was fairly interoptable) got ditched for Skype and not the other way around.

The only "supported" way for third party IM clients to access Skype's network without risk of lawsuits is piggybacking on its COM API and have the user download and log into the official client, and have that handle all the actual communication.

You probably think "He's gotta be kidding", but sadly I'm not.

TLDR: Skype does not only not care for or provide an open-source implementation, but they are actively fighting it.

rogerbinns2• 13 years ago

> ... necessitated by new technical demands

As a bystander, this comes across as "we aren't smart enough to figure it out", or "we are smart enough, but this is a business decision with ulterior ("evil") motives". Neither of those look positive for Google.

I don't expect multi-person video conferences to work, but plain old textual messages, as already work today, shouldn't be a problem.

aneth4• 13 years ago

Wanting to maintain a competitive advantage is not evil in and of itself. Google Hangouts is far from a monopoly and they are under no obligation to make every product completely open. Not only would it be competitively stupid, but it would also hinder product development to be so heavily tied to standards publication.

pyre• 13 years ago

  | It's inevitable people will reverse
  | engineer the client, as was done with MSN,
  | Y! Messenger, and AOL

That's not the end-all be-all though. I remember that AOL was pretty aggressive about keeping unauthorized clients off of their Oscar protocol (the original protocol was 'toc,' IIRC and didn't support all of the 'advanced' features like Buddy Icons, idle times, etc). At one point, AOL's servers would require random chunks of the official AOL IM client's binary as a protection measure. Obviously you can get around this, but it's not something you can do out in the open (distributing AOL IM with, say, Pidgin/libpurple would be copyright infringement).

DannyBee4• 13 years ago

Google Wave was not really done in the opposite way when it came to specs.

The spec were largely written by an an intern and a person not part of the wave team helping wave with other things.

Everyone else was focused on Wave.

groovy2shoes• 13 years ago

As an Android user, the new Hangouts app that replaced the Talk app feels like one step forward and four steps back (in terms of UX). The one step forward is that the chat windows look prettier. The four steps back, from most annoying to least annoying:

1) Chat windows give me no indication of the presence of the other participant(s) in a conversation. If they sign off, I have no idea they've signed off. They frequently get messages from the tail end of a conversation much later, which is confusing for them.

2) The contact list is in alphabetical order, regardless of their presence. Talk used to separate online contacts from offline ones. This was nice because I have a lot of contacts in my gmail account, and only a dozen or so ever sign in to chat. There's no obvious way to change the sort in Hangouts.

3) The UI is higher latency. If I touch a notification in my tray, I often have to wait upwards of two seconds for the Hangouts app to load. The various screens within the app also take longer to load.

4) I used to have a custom notification set when I received a message. Hangouts replaced it with its own and there's no obvious way to change it back.

I hadn't noticed Hangouts had abandoned XMPP. I find this rather unfortunate. Adium on my Mac still connects fine, but for how long?

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable.

Indeed. If basic XMPP wasn't good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or whatever other protocol already exists) then the "right thing to do" would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was. OR, as a secondary option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol, along with an open source reference implementation.

Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort. You can't just take Google services engineered for Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it's not a matter of just code dumping.

Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android, iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with spec document is probably the least priority.

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

True, but I still think they should commit to doing it eventually. Even if they just came out today and said "We'll have an OSS reference implementation and detailed spec available within 6 months" I think most people would be OK with that (as long as they followed through).

But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool.

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

If the reason they can't document is because they have a small team, then this is an easy solution for Google - hire some people to document the system. They don't even have to be in direct contact with the actual development team, just access to the source code and developer design documents should be enough. For a company the size of Google with the amount of profits they make, 'small team' is just not an excuse for anything.

The move is definitely deliberate, they can't have Skype come in and allow people with Skype to make calls to hangout when the hangout client can't make calls into Skype. It would make them look bad.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

> To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate engineering effort.

So what. More effort that's required to do things properly. Create a protocol, publish it, start deploying (especially if it breaks what's working now). Doing things the other way around creates a horrible mess.

sinkasapa2• 13 years ago

Is the implication here that Google would like to do this but cannot because it doesn't have enough time and resources? If that is the case and they care for openness, why not just wait to kill their open product until they are able to do the right thing according to their values with the new product? After all, Talk already exists and works.

It is hard to say whether Google as an organization is something you can characterize as "nice" or "mean" but the actions taken here have clear implications. They are deleting the open protocol and replacing it with a proprietary one. Whether their heart is in the right place or they just have some rotten circumstances to deal with doesn't matter really. Perhaps Microsoft with Skype might say that they are closed on purpose but Google will say they are closed by accident because, well, you know, of all the things they can do, this is the one that is too hard. But it doesn't matter. It is the exact same effect.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

> the "right thing to do" would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was

Generally, the way you work with a standards body to extend or modify an existing standard is the same way you work with a standards body to create a new standard, and that is: 1. Build a prototype product, 2. Get some use on it so you can find and knock off the rough edges, 3. Once your comfortable that you've knocked off enough of the rough edges, submit the new or revised protocol to the appropriate.

mosqutip• 13 years ago

This is quite sad, and what seems to be a growing trend at Google.

godgod3• 13 years ago

I've noticed this trend as well. Privacy is dead at Google. Sleep with dogs(US govt), don't get upset when you wake up with fleas.

orangethirty5• 13 years ago

The bigger issue here is that Google is integrating everything into G+. They are moving away from being a search engine, towards being a social network with better search capabilities than Facebook. The problem is that the average Google users (read, non hacker, and generally not computer smart) does not understand the changes. They just go to Google to learn about a new chicken recipe, or what side-effects does Singulair has. They don't go there to socialize. And Google is forcing this into everybody. Which is a significant deal, because for a lot of people out there ( a lot) Google is the internet. Just like AOL was in the 90's, Google is now. They are diluting their brand, and going in every direction. Before you say anything else, I use google products. I like Google. I remember their old nerdy logo. I loved how they took on the old search engines of yore, and beat them at their own game. But it has reached a point where Google is now a faceless corporation simply driven to profit. All of their actions point to that. They seem to no longer really care about the users. Just like IBM, MS, and all the old tech giants. Management has taken over. The true hacker spirit seems to not be found anymore.

angryasian3• 13 years ago

I disagree with their mobile efforts they need to start unifying all these disjointed services, like they did with hangouts. It makes sense to associate your google accounts with your google mobile account along with your data storage as well.

orangethirty5• 13 years ago

I have little issue with that. Though the problem is how they handle it. If you, for any reason (read: error on the part) get your account suspended, then you are royally fucked. You loose all of your data, across all services. What good does that do? But if I had a separate account for each one (with the same login credentials), then I would not be locked way from my data. If I have an issue with Gmail, then Drive would still be available. But no, they wont have that.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

Why does it make sense?

We have different concerns for how our data is used with respect to different accounts. I certainly don't want my name associated with any public-facing element of my accounts. My name's for close personal friends only - you can do a lot of damage to someone if you know their name and even more if you have a picture of them. The more stuff you stick together into one account, the more control the person loses and the greater your risk across all the elements of the service becomes in all respects - privacy, security and even in terms of google screwing you over for something.

In some ways this manifests as people just not using certain elements of the service - I have to have a google+ account to review apps now. So, I don't review apps anymore. I have to have a google+ account to correct tags on maps. So, I don't correct tags on maps anymore.

In others ways people don't always get the option to opt out though, or don't understand it, the choice having been purposefully obfuscated - and there it's a fairly straightforward attack on their privacy. People are not the same person across all the elements of the service - and for good reason.

It's just a really really aggressive, nasty solution to a problem that no-one seemed to be making much of in the first place. Let's integrate everything, let's force everyone to have an account they don't want on our social network, let's force everyone's names out into the open. Bleh.

bad_user6• 13 years ago

Yeah, so when a script calculates a probability that you're violating some TOS, your whole access to Google is shut down, including GMail, including GDrive, not just that one individual service for which there's a 70% probability of a TOS violation - and then there won't be somebody on the phone you could talk to, because Google is too busy and can't possibly be offering any kind of support, you ungrateful bastard.

I actually know the owner of a business that is using Blogger and Google Apps and at some point freaking YouTube asked for her date of birth, she then selected the wrong year and Google cut her access to GMail, not to mention that it took their blog offline. She then called me desperatly to do something about it. Fortunately they allow validation of birth date by credit card now, but I remember some point not so long ago, where this wasn't the case.

So yeah, who wouldn't want that?

pkulak• 13 years ago

> simply driven to profit

Really? Then they are pretty bad at it. At least short term. They don't seem to be monetising any of their recent projects.

aniket_ray2• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: As a Google Engineer, this is my understanding of Google+.

I think Google+ could be understood better once you realize that Google+ is not a social network in the traditional terms. Google+ is truly a social layer across all Google services.

The average users who are just looking for a chicken recipe (as you mention) would always love to find the particular chicken recipe that their friends have recommended. Even more relevant to me (since I don't cook) is that if a friend finds a todo app useful, I'd definitely want to know.

If Google has this social layer, it'll really unleash more expressive search results that would help the vast majority of users. This is what Google+ is.

Google+ is literally Google Plus More.

Of course, to get these benefits you really have to start using Google+ on different Google services. I guess this is the reason that Google employees who actually use Google+ services continue using it and prefer if their friends do it too.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

Those are all things that nobody wants. Not only do we not want them, we abhor the thought. That's what Google isn't getting.

We just want to search. Or keep using email like we have been for a decade. People switched to Gmail because it was like hotmail with a nicer interface and a large mailbox limit.

Maybe some people do want those other things. That's fine, give them their own corner, let them play with the toy social network or social layer or however you want to pitch it. Stop force-feeding it to the rest of us. I don't want to know what my friends are searching for or what recipes they like. It's just unwanted noise.

And let's call a spade a spade - "sharing" has very little to do with friends and everything to do with advertisers. It's very disingenuous and insulting of Google to pretend that the primary purpose of +1 buttons is to "share with friends".

orangethirty5• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a Google competitor.

Good and fair points. The big issue here is the fact that all of what you said is tied to a persons real life identity. I think people should have the option to choose whether they want to surf the web using a pseudonym, or doing it with their real name. Google forces people to use their real name in order to be able to squeeze out more profits per user.

Socially slanted search is the future, and I agree with that. But not in the way that Google is doing it. Not everything has to be social.

srikyada• 13 years ago

>I think Google+ could be understood better once you realize that Google+ is not a social network in the traditional terms. Google+ is truly a social layer across all Google services.

This is what we hear all the time from google executives, when explaining what google+ is. As a user, I dont see any difference between google+ vs facebook. In terms enabling social interaction, google+ is same as facebook. posting picutres, videos, chatting with friends, liking stuff on internet, games, etc. Also dont see why they try to spin this in any other way. Google+ goes a step further by integrating into search,Ads etc.

danbmil99• 13 years ago

> Just like IBM, MS, and all the old tech giants.

You missed one. I smell a fanboy

orangethirty5• 13 years ago

Which one did I miss? Oracle? Apple? I'm a fanboy of Nuuton, no one else. (:

mwfunk2• 13 years ago

I've found that those who see fanboys everywhere do it because they are total fanboys of something or other themselves, so that's the lens through which they project everything. So really all you are saying with comments like this is that you yourself base your own beliefs on fanboyism, whether you realize it or not.

jspark• 13 years ago

Does facebook follow an open standard for their messaging system?

zokier• 13 years ago

Facebook chat is XMPP, yes, if that's what you are asking.

dannyr• 13 years ago

Also add WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, Kik.

Google is getting clobbered in the messaging space by these apps. If Google thinks they can move faster by dropping XMPP support, I'm fine with it.

Imagine if Google sticks with XMPP and continue to lose market share in messaging. They might have to shut down Talk. We know what happens when Google sunsets a product, lots of angry people.

Lose-lose situation for Google here.

saraid2164• 13 years ago

Sort of? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

It's XMPP at core, but - AFAIK - they also do not support server-to-server federation. So you can connect to Facebook chat with any XMPP compatible client, but if you run your own ejabberd server, you can't connect to your server, and then message your Facebook friends.

hwatson• 13 years ago

It's not. As https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ explains, "Facebook Chat should be compatible with every XMPP client, but is not a full XMPP server. It should be thought of as a proxy into the world of Facebook Chat on www.facebook.com.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

Even though Facebook uses XMPP, they aren't federated, so they are cut off from the rest of the XMPP network. Therefore the benefit of them using XMPP extends only on using different clients. I.e. it's half good, half bad.

peterwaller• 13 years ago

Larry inspired me with his talk the other week, in which he lamented that Microsoft (and others) were playing silly zero-sum games in their own closed ecosystems.

I've immediately stopped using as many Google products as I can in response to this after trying out the new hangouts a few days ago and finding I couldn't connect with my friends that weren't on Google.

I'm sad - this directly removes choice and is a sort of lockin. I now can't use Google to communicate with people who choose not to participate in Google's ecosystem for whatever reason.

By leaving, I also make it harder to communicate with many friends who are on Google.

Google, you've alienated me.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

I'm a lot more interested in them adding OTR encryption than having interoperability. However, if they never intend to add OTR (which being Google, seems very likely), then I'd want Hangouts to at least work with other IM's that do offer OTR, like Gtalk has worked so far.

cbr• 13 years ago

Is this out of date: https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291

archivator• 13 years ago

The option is still there on a chat-per-chat basis but they removed the "Turn history off by default" setting.

Edit: Actually, I don't know that "turn history off" does the same thing as that option, they just seem the same.

magicalist7• 13 years ago

That's just turning off chat history, which is confusingly also referred to as "off the record". Usually when people talk about OTR for chat, they mean client-to-client encryption, so not even the chat provider knows what the content of the chats were, analogous to using something like PGP for email.

magicalist7• 13 years ago

OTR is important, but I don't think you really want your chat provider also providing the OTR implementation. Better to use a third-party client. Preferably open source.

Doing it browser-based also seems problematic, for all the usual javascript/encryption reasons. I've never heard of people using it in regular Gtalk, though. How does that work? Browser extension?

I've only ever seen things like using Pidgin with OTR, which should still work as long as you have a Google account (aka you don't need XMPP federation to talk to people on google's network).

newman314• 13 years ago

Gtalk's OTR is not real.

http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2013/01/how-to-do-encry...

shmerl4• 13 years ago

Well said. Google made a bad move with breaking things before enabling interoperability by publishing their protocol. It's not the proper way of doing things. Firstly, they could extend XMPP, Jingle etc. instead of creating something from scratch.

If they can't (though they didn't explain why), they need first to develop a protocol, publish it, and then start deploying it. Not other way around! Right now they are moving towards cutting the connection between Google users and users of other XMPP servers. Connection which works already now. I can understand that they might envision new communication patterns, but it doesn't mean one has to break what already works before enabling others to interoperate. It's completely immature on Google's part. Going the right way might take more time - but it will not increase the horrible mess that the IM scene is today. What Google does now is creating only more mess.

godgod3• 13 years ago

Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.

pjscott• 13 years ago

What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads next to the search results.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

The same motive. This isn't even a secret conspiracy, their ToS says they do it and says that is why they do it. The more data they have on you, the more ad money they make.

Why do you think the ads you see in a search just happen to contain items you were just emailing your mother about a day prior?

flipcoder• 13 years ago

Conspiracy or not, Google products fit the definition of spyware.

Shank2• 13 years ago

So order takeout (http://google.com/takeout) and leave (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en).

It really bugs me to see people claiming "Google is in bed with the US government," but fail to acknowledge the transparency report:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/

Or how about when Google gave a range of NSLs they received? Does Microsoft do this?

hcarvalhoalves2• 13 years ago

That's one reason to dislike Google. They push free (as in beer) services and standards until they kill all competitors, then let it rot. To me what they do is even worse than going with proprietary solutions from the start and charging for it, at least that's honest and fosters competition. Just look at what they did with Google Apps.

Nowadays I only trust services where they profit (aka. anything that includes advertising), and none of the open standards they push forward.

creativityland• 13 years ago

Couldn't have said it better myself.

magicalist7• 13 years ago

Except this is just generic Google comment #4 and has nothing to do with the current situation. AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP.

Google Apps doesn't seem especially relevant, but it also has lots of competitors (including, just like chat, very active open source projects), hasn't been left to rot, and they've actually moved to only charging for it, instead of having an ad-supported version.

...so, are you really just talking about Reader?

hcarvalhoalves2• 13 years ago

> AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP.

That's not how I see it at all.

You make it look like they are improving the service and that requires breaking compatibility with XMPP, but it's yet another strategy to force users into Google+ by consolidating Google Talk under the "Hangouts" feature. Commitment to open standards is only skin deep.

munificent2• 13 years ago

> kill all competitors, then let it rot.

Google hasn't killed competitors. Google chat is losing ground to iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp, all of which are proprietary walled gardens. If XMPP federation was an important feature for end users, why would those products, which are all newer than Google's chat, have been able to supplant it?

Sure, I'm sad that Google is turning off federation too, but I'm happy that it will let the team move faster to make a product that adds value to people's lives.

MrQuincle• 13 years ago

It's just a matter of time before something like Vidyo [1] is replaced by WebRTC. There is too much at stake for Google to be the kitchen sink for all kind of technologies. They want you to connect to them.

[1] http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/

zachgersh• 13 years ago

It's a defensive posture in response to what Apple has been doing with iMessage.

RivieraKid2• 13 years ago

It's often not in the best interest of private companies to use open standards. If using an open standard is a net financial loss, why should the company do that? It's simply the result of how the system works. I've been thinking whether the rules (=laws) can be changed somehow to provide incentive for using open standards, but it's quite a complicated problem.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Instead of adding more rules with their inevitable unintended consequences, I'd rather we'd kill the rules that promote closed protocols, like the anti-reverse-engineering clauses and overreaching "anti-hacking" laws.

ausjke3• 13 years ago

'dont be evil'

ausjke3• 13 years ago

by down-voting this is getting even more evil, I don't mind what google does, just please don't wear a 'dont be evil' outfit while doing it, you can't have it both ways, why bother.

runjake2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure you're being downvoted because your comment didn't add any value to the conversation.

Beyond that, we see a "don't be evil" comment every time a Google-related post comes along.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

I am not clear why EFF is lobbying on behalf of the XMPP standards foundation here. The entire computing industry is cluttered with opportunities for interoperable standards, some of which haven't been tried, some of which worked out, and some of which were attempted but (often correctly) jettisoned in favor of progress.

Standardization is a good thing, but not the only good thing, and it always worries me when people make arguments that effectively demand that new offerings justify themselves (either with time or money) to existing standards groups.

jessriedel• 13 years ago

Am I misunderstanding, or does your last paragraph rule out social pressure as a force for standardization? Are you proposing that we simply allow standards to evolve according to the local incentives of individual agents?

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Sometimes. Standards bodies are not themselves entirely benign. They're extremely susceptible to capture, and the incentives of those people not in service of some commercial agenda are often not aligned with users either.

People sometimes lose sight of the real goal, which is interoperability. Interoperability is harmed not just by deliberately idiosyncratic implementations of old ideas, but by refusal to adapt to new ones.

ralphm2• 13 years ago

This isn't so much about XMPP. Dropping federation, without notice to cross-boundary contacts, is the bigger thing for me. I am personally disappointed about the whole affair, especially because there is still no clear picture on why that would be necessary.

As an XMPP Council member I can say that general consensus within the XMPP Standards Foundation is that we will just move forward, no longer constrained by things, like network security, Google never got around to implement.

bad_user6• 13 years ago

Why do you have a problem with EFF lobbying for a standard? They lobby whenever they feel like it's necessary and this isn't the first time they lobby for privacy or for open standards, after all, their motto is "defending your rights in the digital world" and I think that dropping support for federation or for disabling the archiving of chats is within their goals.

At this point, standardization for video chat is one of the most important steps forward. We already have proprietary video chat services. We already have the likes of Yahoo, Skype and Facebook.

Why do we need another proprietary protocol to throw in the mix? What could possibly be more important than an open standard at this point? And yeah, Hangouts has some cool stuff in it, but not enough to justify the breaking of a promise, but then again, it's not the first time where I feel like Google is disappointing.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Every time software progress threatens the status quo, partians of the standard argue that the new functionality proposed doesn't justify degrading standardization. Who are those partisans to say?

djloche• 13 years ago

Google isn't abandoning open standards for instant messaging. They're abandoning instant messaging. They've moved from a real time communications tool to a messaging tool. This is incredibly frustrating for those who used previously used Google Talk for instant messaging purposes, but now have to look for other options outside the Google ecosystem.

swiil• 13 years ago

I switched back.

tn13• 13 years ago

Actually makes total sense. Companies like Google should always remain ahead of the curve. They should innovate much faster than any of the open standards could grow.

claudius3• 13 years ago

They can use XMPP as a base and build extensions for everything they need atop of that, then use these extensions immediately while they go through the XSF and eventually become a standard.

XMPP has sort of been designed with extensibility and innovation in mind.

yeleti• 13 years ago

We abandoned xmpp for node.js and websockets at www.tesla.im

nwmcsween• 13 years ago

Thank god XMPP is disgusting.

guest• 13 years ago

Internet abandons Google, heads back to the glory days of Prodigy and Compuserv.

Sales of animated gif skyrocket, solving financial crisis.

drivebyacct24• 13 years ago

The sad thing is, no one has noticed that Hangouts is invoking a WebRTC plugin in my PulseAudio container, leading me to believe that they're already experimenting with WebRTC.

With WebRTC, a proper signaling protocol (they're probably using Jingle anyway, give the RTC history and the fact that RTC relies and builds on Jingle), and a relay server, there's not much to need to do to interoperate if they wanted to enable it.

This whole notion that they "can't" make it interoperable or that it will "slow them down", is complete and utter shit. Slow them down on what? All I've seen so far is more merging of GoogleTalk+GooglePlus and a rebranding effort. Basically no new feature, no integration with Google Voice, no seamless integration with SMS.

eunice• 13 years ago

IMAP in gmail next

rnicholson• 13 years ago

got a source? Or just wildly speculating?

farinasa2• 13 years ago

They killed calDAV. IMAP is a bit of a jump, but mark my words, cardDAV will be next.

josteink3• 13 years ago

Google abandoning open standards is nothing new.

It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in a heartbeat and exploit that.

Just look at what they did to the open web with Chrome.

First they said "Web standards are important, so here is a good, fast and web-standards compliant browser. Feel free to try it". After a while that was not enough, and on every single web-page they had they had a big "Use Chrome!" ad for every visitor not using it already.

Once they had gained enough dominance, suddenly Google started using non-W3C HTML in their production web-sites. HTML which had not been fully drafted or ratified and which was only available as they saw fit in web-kit.

And then all the other non-Google browsers were suddenly "slow" on "adopting new HTML standards". Basically through its internet dominance, and now its browser, Google pushed through its own implementation of proprietary HTML features as standards other browsers had to implement, without any discussion, feedback or other input.

Google just decided that they alone should dictate how the HTML-standard is from now on.

After seeing that happen, I lost all belief in Google as a company which I will rely on for anything more than I strictly need to.

lucian1900• 13 years ago

This is not the case at all, though. WHATWG is a good example of several browser makers cooperating. The only thing entirely Chrome-only is NaCl and it's not exposed to web pages (just extensions).

Kequc• 13 years ago

Are you from the future? Because Chrome is leaving webkit in the coming weeks but they still haven't yet. Chrome uses the full set of W3C standards in use though webkit and not any custom version of it.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4186302/google-chrome-blink...

StavrosK• 13 years ago

> It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them

To be fair, how did XMPP serve them? They weren't really benefitting from it, they did it mostly for the good of the community.

msbarnett• 13 years ago

It let people seamlessly move to gchat from compatible chat services, which led to quick uptake (it's the only reason I started using pretty much as soon as it was available) and got Google a lot of chat logs to datamine.

munificent2• 13 years ago

> It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in a heartbeat and exploit that.

I don't see how Google is dominating the competition. Gchat used to be a dominant player, I believe, but that was before mobile existed. I think the dominant players now are:

iMessage. Propriety, only runs on Apple devices, can only communicate with other iMessage users.

Facebook Messenger. Proprietary, only runs in Facebook site and app, can only communicate with other Facebook users.

WhatsApp. I think based on XMPP? Only runs in WhatsApp application, can only communicate with other WhatsApp users.

Notice that every single one of those is a walled garden.

jadyoyster• 13 years ago

Unlike WhatsApp, Facebook chat is accessible via standard non-federated XMPP, so you can use it with any XMPP client.

brent_noorda• 13 years ago

Embrace, Extend, Exterminate, Exmpp.

plywoodtrees• 13 years ago

I would also like an open standard but I had to laugh at the final sentence of the EFF statement:

> To be clear, even the earlier [off-the-record] setting was far from perfect from a privacy perspective: disabling chat history only kept the logged messages out of your Gmail account, and didn't prevent other users, or Google itself, from keeping a record of the conversation.

How on earth would you expect an open protocol to prevent the other keeping a record of a conversation? It's like asking for perfect DRM with open clients.

claudius3• 13 years ago

They could[0] implement some client side actual OTR[1], at least blocking Google from keeping the clear-text message. No idea how they would want to force the intended recipient of the message not to store it, though.

[0] In theory with infinite resources and time. Maybe.

[1] Or any other sort of encryption.

fakeer• 13 years ago

Time for email, im, calendar, tasks, notes, docs and other services start-ups (for individual users).

Better if they are decentralized. You wouldn't have to move everything at once. But this will also increase costs.

farinasa2• 13 years ago

Google has dropped support for XMPP (chat) and calDAV (calendar syncing). What's next? cardDAV? IMAP?? Honestly I can see that Google is no longer interested in open protocols. They are afraid that it's too easy for their users to simply migrate everything away. Their response is to build a wall around their users. Enough red flags have been raised for me to, unfortunately, say goodbye.

Perhaps I may still buy their hardware, but they want to isolate my data from every company but them. They are no longer reliable.

acd• 13 years ago

The Google mantra "Don't be evil" - not! Decision to drop XMPP is bad/evil. Seems more like the strategy of customer lock in.

Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging

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