How Google pulled the plug on the public Jabber Network

http://jabbermania.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-google-pulled-plug-on-public-jabber.html

by sciurus • 13 years ago

93 25 13 years ago

jabbermania.blogspot.com

sneak4• 13 years ago

WhatsApp is also a walled-garden XMPP network, with many more actives than Google Talk I'd bet.

Is all this 'net-rage just because they once supported s2s and now they don't?

The whole point of federation is so that people can do as they please. If users want federation, they'll use providers that federate.

mdasen• 13 years ago

I think we can all see how wonderful email is because of its interoperability and many of us wish IM had that. When Google announced XMPP federation, it felt like it could be the start of something better. It wasn't. Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo didn't play along and even big third parties that used XMPP wanted to keep a walled-garden. But when Google kiled federation, it was a blow (at least to me). It meant that it wasn't going to happen. As long as Google was federating, there was that glimmer of hope that things might change. Maybe some startup will be open and awesome and it will kick-off change once people see how interoperability makes things great like email. Maybe even Microsoft or Yahoo would switch and it would pressure others creating a cascade. Today, even if Yahoo decided "open is the way to go for IM," they don't have Google already there. There had always been the possibility that someone big would join Google's openness. There isn't that possibility now.

I don't think it's hard to argue that things that are universal are better in a lot of circumstances. I can call anyone via phone number, I can email anyone via their email address. It's awesome. With something like Skype, I can only connect with Skype users. That's less great. Not only do I have to use Skype, I have to convince others to use it as well. People have to buy into Skype. When I switched to Gmail early on, it didn't matter if others didn't use Gmail. If something new and great comes along in the IM space, it likely won't get traction because of the network effects. I know that one can point to counter-examples. That isn't the point. The point is that users should be able to use and migrate to better services. The openness of email allowed Gmail to thrive with a low cost of switching.

I don't blame Google for going closed, but it is sad. It extinguishes some of the hope for something truly better. And it's sad when the champion of open throws in the towel on it. I'm not trying to canonize Google, but they have pushed for a decent amount of openness on the internet and when they've given up on open IM, it's hard to imagine someone else (who is big and influential) picking up the cause.

snuxoll5• 13 years ago

Maybe even Microsoft or Yahoo would switch and it would pressure others creating a cascade.

Microsoft actually made XMPP federation a big deal with Lync Server 2013, there used to be an entire server role that needed to be installed for federation but now it's just part of the edge server role as an optional feature. Even Microsoft sees federation as being important, too bad Google doesn't.

sneak4• 13 years ago

When Google announced XMPP federation, it felt like it could be the start of something better. It wasn't. Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo didn't play along and even big third parties that used XMPP wanted to keep a walled-garden. But when Google kiled federation, it was a blow (at least to me). It meant that it wasn't going to happen.

Nobody's built the killer realtime messaging app yet. Skype is the closest we have, and it sucks on the iPhone and has no web interface so it doesn't run on ChromeOS.

WhatsApp doesn't work on tablets and requires a phone number as your primary identity.

Facebook and Twitter DM have become large, but aren't there yet because they don't do video/voice and don't federate (and at least in Twitter's case, don't sync read/unread between devices). iMessage and FaceTime would be it, bar none, if it worked on non-Apple hardware - if only from the bootstrap momentum of every single iOS user.

There is opportunity here. If I wanted to be in the software development business, I would solve this problem and eat WhatApp's lunch.

Ideally it'd be federated, but that's not a hard requirement. It just needs to work perfectly on every device that every person sends and receives messages from. That's not that hard these days, which is why it's baffling that nobody's built it yet.

I have an inkling that Hangouts is attempting to become that thing. If indeed that's their plan, they will easily crush Skype.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

The whole point of federation is so that people can do as they please.

If people don't want federation, they ought to want it. I know that's a futile position, but it's mine. And as someone said on HN recently, giving people what they want is what a drug dealer does. Anyone can do that, and shame on them.

Here's a new thought: if you, by yourself, don't know what is good, then you can also not know if "what the people want" is good. And if you do, then you can not heed "what the people want" where it goes against what you know to be good. That people can and should argue about what they personally consider good is true, but a separate matter.

I don't think it's hard to understand, the confusion is also founded in denial; I think people should also face the possibility of being drug dealers and/or addicts. Maybe we all are in some ways, and there is less shame in that than in not even wanting to recognize it for what it is. Lazyness is a drug, and the long-term costs to ourselves and society are staggering. We could be in the information age by now, or at least heading towards it.. instead we're getting kinda silly because it's more fun.

We had the gap between rich and poor, that still keep growing at an increasing pace, and we don't even care that on the net, where everything is super cheap and easy in comparison, and where we could at least play "utopian society" a bit, or practice if you will, most people live in hotels that snoop on them, try to extort as money from them as possible, deceive them at every step, try to suck up all their time with trivial pursuits, and so on..

Gah. All the nice, wonderful things we still have, we have despite of "our" stewardship, not because of it, and partially as crumbs that fall of this table of hi-tech cold war... but I see mostly vultures at the wheels, and it could be much better with genuinely good intentions.

voidlogic2• 13 years ago

"There is no open IM network anymore"

Cyrptocat? IRC?

speeder• 13 years ago

IRC is not a IM network, Cryptocat I dunno (I don't use it, I have only a vague idea of what it is)

voidlogic2• 13 years ago

I don't use it, I have only a vague idea of what it is

Really? http://bit.ly/11ZLOps

lukasb• 13 years ago

In my dreams, there's an organization pushing for interoperability, open standards, data freedom etc over the long term. If there were such an organization, this would make an excellent case study in failure. Are there any strategic interventions that could have rescued XMPP federation?

Spooky232• 13 years ago

We're in the middle of this war between giant companies around the future of collaboration. Google, Cisco, Microsoft, etc are aggressively building marketshare for cloud services and telecom, but they're success will eventually mean that they'll run out of new customers. So they need to steal from each other.

For Microsoft, XMPP federation is a great way to contain Google and make inroads on places that are Cisco IM/phone shops. In the long run, they want to extend corporate email dominance to phone via Lync/Skype.

Google doesn't want to be a commodity. Hangouts is their secret sauce. What do they gain by being open?

Nux• 13 years ago

"Google doesn't want to be a commodity. Hangouts is their secret sauce. What do they gain by being open?"

The support of many geeks worldwide (and subsequently their friends and customers), just as it happened until recently when their "do no evil" transformed in "screw you". Google (gmail, gtalk etc) would have never risen to this level of popularity without them.

MattJ100• 13 years ago

With all due respect to the author (whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago at an XMPP summit), in my opinion most of the points in this post are unfounded, and overly pessimistic.

There is still a public XMPP network, just as there would still be a public network even if Google decided to put up walls around Gmail.

Google's decision was almost certainly about federation, and not about technical flaws within the XMPP protocol itself. Google have never raised issues of spam before, despite participating in the XMPP community in other areas (they are a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation, even). Indeed in my experience spam problems on XMPP have traditionally been very simple and localized, there is to date no general spam problem on XMPP (yet...).

Attempts to solicit feedback from Google on the many proposed spam-prevention mechanisms in XMPP failed, as did requests for information about the spam problems they claimed to be seeing recently, nor the solutions they put in place to prevent them.

To claims that XMPP doesn't scale - well, they have successfully run the Google Talk service for the best part of a decade now. I really don't think scalability is an issue, and they are still using (and expanding!) XMPP in other areas that also require scale (Android, for example).

Finally, to say that WebRTC is replacing Jingle is just nonsense. WebRTC requires external signalling to work, and Jingle, a signalling protocol by nature, works just fine for this.

Google's decision is undoubtedly a step backwards for the open IM cause, but the XMPP network is not at risk because of it. There are many users and businesses who are simply not going to entrust their communications to a third party, and many of those do want federation. This hasn't changed, Google can't change it.

_ouxp• 13 years ago

I used to run my own XMPP server (OpenFire) and had my DNS SRV records correctly set up so people could chat to me from gmail. I found that one major source of pain was that Google Apps for Domains customers couldn't chat with me. It only worked with gmail addresses.

Why? Because Google Apps for Domains customers hadn't configured their SRV records for their domains. Why? Because for these Google customers, chat "just worked" with all other Google Apps for Domains and Gmail addresses with no configuration.

Google supported and used XMPP federation, but seemingly "embraced and extended" it to make it "just work" within their network.

I stopped running my system when I couldn't chat with my clients and didn't feel credible telling them they couldn't chat with me because their working but misconfigured chat system was in fact misconfigured.

xentronium• 13 years ago

I found that one major source of pain was that Google Apps for Domains customers couldn't chat with me

I had exact same problem (set my own openfire server when google announced changes to gtalk about a month ago), and it resolved itself after waiting for several hours. Give it a try again sometime.

How Google pulled the plug on the public Jabber Network

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