Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK

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78 pointsrachellaw72 comments

Another walled garden chat? Why can't they develop a shared IETF supported standard (if XMPP isn't good enough for them)? It's a shame what a huge mess IM landscape has become because big players don't care about standardization and federation.

Counter argument: Standardization and federation comes at a cost. Facebook can build a more cohesive product with interesting features by controlling the ecosystem completely. That's the whole point; they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol.

That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special.

An example: FB lets you send one-click "likes". It's a great feature; it means "acknowledged". Yet you can't send it with third-party clients, and third-party clients receive it as a URL to an image of a thumbs-up. There's dozens of features like this. How frustrating would it be if Facebook Voice Calls only worked with some people, or someone's client didn't support group messages?

> Standardization and federation comes at a cost.

At a cost that provides long term interopraibility benefits. But these just care about short term rip offs and as well causing interoperability problems for their users (i.e. preventing communication with other services). We must be extremely lucky this didn't stay like that for e-mail.

> they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol.

That's the point. They measure their gain in how much they can mess up their users (by preventing them from communicating with users of other services). While gain should be measured in how useful such services can become (enhancing, not crippling communication).

> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber

It's not federated (which defeats the main purpose).

> I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special.

If they wanted to improve things and thought that XMPP can't reach that goal, they could propose their non XMPP chat as IETF standard. Same as Google could do with Hangouts and so on.

Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability.

They won't understand the question. They have a FB app on their iPhone and facebook.com on their desktop, and they won't understand what you mean.

If they want to message someone "on another service", they'll just use that other service.

> Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability.

Many do complain about it, but can't do much to fix it. People either end up installing 20 different clients to reach those who use other services (imagine installing 20 browsers to read different sites or 20 e-mail clients to use different e-mail accounts), or simply don't communicate with those users when that number grows annoyingly large. This problem affects everyone, and it's pretty apparent even to those who don't visit HN.

I don't install 20 different clients, and the ones I do install are ones where I want to keep things separate. I don't want Slack messages showing up in my Facebook messages. I don't want Facebook messages showing up in Apple Messages on OSX.

Standard protocols and interoperability do not preclude this. Plenty of people have separate work email addresses from their personal ones.

Indeed. Separation of accounts and profiles isn't really related to artificial separation of existing services which prevents interoperability. Accounts should be separable according to user's preferences, and not according to how services decided not to federate. It's pretty self explanatory.

And interestingly most people use separate clients for their work and personal email accounts.

I've replied up-thread about this, but while it's true that some people complain about it, many also see this as a strength. Plenty of people are quite happy to install 20 IM clients in order to keep different aspects of their life separate.

If you doubt this, think back to the numerous HN threads where people complain about how they want to keep the Facebook profile separate to their LinkedIn profile. It's unclear why this is different.

You are mixing up the need to separate accounts / identities (which even single client can easily do even for the same service), and artificial separation of services caused by the lack of interoperability. Those are completely unrelated issues (first is something that user should have a choice to do, second is something forced on the user).

I explained it here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856612

I'm not mixing anything up. I'm saying that many people prefer it (and actually I do too).

Saying that they are completely unrelated issues appears to ignore a minor detail called implementation(!?)

Almost every mainstream IM client requires you to sign out of one account and into another if you want to maintain separate accounts. That means that if you actually want to use them (ie, get instant messages instantly) you need to be signed into all your accounts at once.

Yoy didn't address my point above. The need to separate identities and accounts is not equal to the boundaries set by non federated services.

And my IM clients have no problem enabling many accounts in parallel. Some client must be really crippled and archaic not to enable that. I can run multiple clients too if I wish (Pidgin. KDE Telepathy and etc.) but not because they can't talk to the same service but for whatever MY reason. Again - don't mix up unrelated issues.

even enough people care about it then it's a market opportunity. You should jump on that if you think enough people care about it.

My assumption, not enough people care to sustain a business.

It's not that. This problem is simply not viable to be solved by market alone.

I could jump in and make an integration solution, providing interop between various communication mediums. So will my competitors, and now everyone has 20 interop apps to chose from, and the problem jumps one meta-level up. Or the companies who own the services I try to make talk to one another will decide that I (or my users) break their ToS and retaliate.

Also good luck going with that when everyone's so big on encryption and sandboxing apps, making sure their interop capabilities are nil.

If consumers cared enough, they would switch from the closed platforms. Not enough people value it, and that's the hard fact.

Consumers won't care, and they never will. Sometimes the market simply exploits a coordination problem, and you can not depend on customers to care there, because they're stuck in a trap and can't collectively express their opinion in a way that would matter on market.

Other times it exploits information asymmetry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, half of the good theoretical things about markets break down completely if you can't assume rational and perfectly informed customers. Well, in terms of products and services having anything to do with technology, you generally can't. General population is 100% clueless. Therefore markets following only their feedback may lead them to pretty suboptimal situations.

I'm not some kind of libertarian free-market solves all problems person. I think markets have many short comings. However, this is a case where I think people genuinely prefer the closed platforms for all kinds of reasons. They are better user experiences, they are easier to understand for a busy layperson, etc.

Yes, and go ask those same people about e-mail interop, and they'll again roll eyes at you. They don't care about it because they don't have a fucking clue. They're just happy it works.

And it's ok. I don't have a clue about how the washing powder works, but I know I can clean any clothes with any powder. I am not an electrical engineer, but I know I can buy any random light bulb and I know it will work with any of my lamps. I know next to nothing about logistics, but I am confident that I can use the same address with any random company to have my package or letter delivered to a person.

The world runs and grows on standardization. That's how we progressed from medieval times to industrial revolution! By standardizing tools and measures used in manufacturing! A lot of it we got by accidents of history. Now it needs to be forced against the market. It has to be, and those of us who have a clue need to fight for it.

What's sad is that the new wave of companies try to transplant their greedy and egotistic ideas from the world of software back to the real world. Any light bulb compatible with any lamp? That's about to become a thing of the past, thanks to the IoT bullshit.

Two days ago, the first day of the quarter, our professor put us in groups and told us to exchange contact info. For reasons surpassing my understanding, they all hated email, someone suggested Facebook, but not everyone was on it. Someone suggested iMessage, again, not everyone was on it, so we ended up using SMS. An interoperable standard.

can you send "likes" by typing out "(y)"?

Not the same likes. At some point Facebook added a "like" button in the Messenger, which immediately sends a slightly-different thumbs-up. On Android it replaces the "send message" button when you haven't entered any text yet, and it also features as an action if you expand the new message notification. Both of these make it super-convenient to use it.

(Though personally, I don't use it at all; a thumbs-up icon feels disrespectful for me, I prefer to acknowledge by typing out "OK" or even a smiley.)

> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber.

Facebook planned to shut down that service since 2015/04/30, and in my experience they actually did it around 2015/07/12

I'm puzzled as how you haven't realized it... I guess that the xmpp endpoint might still be working for some users?

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

Approaching that event, I warned friends to stop contacting me on Facebook, since I would stop checking its messages. (all of my email/phone/chat contacts are available in my about page, so it wouldn't be difficult for people to adapt)

The problem is that there's no way to disable the chat, so people wouldn't mistakenly use it to contact me. And since I still use the facebook web page somewhat regularly, I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of using actively another walled chat protocol. My kludgy solution was to go and "mute" every single conversation I had in the last year. It basically never happens that new people write me on Facebook, and this way I can still check the messages once in a while, but de-facto I'm not actively using their chat service anymore, thus hopefully not contributing to the network effect.

I never use facebook chat. I would use it, and google+ chat, if they weren't closed off. Basically, if I could use the same client for all my chat-systems, I would. But since they want me to have a browser-tab open for each one, I'll just keep abstaining.

Eric Ries has written extensively on how he initially spent months engineering cross-IM compatibility for IMVU, and then when they shipped it he found that a large number of their customers saw separate IM networks as a strength, not a weakness.

They'd say, "Hey, that guy was neat; I want to add him to my buddy list. Where's my buddy list?" And we'd say, "Oh, no, you don't want a new buddy list; you want to use your regular AOL buddy list." You could see their eyes go wide, and they'd say, "Are you kidding me? A stranger on my buddy list?" To which we'd respond, "Yes; otherwise you'd have to download a whole new IM program with a new buddy list." And they'd say, "Do you have any idea how many IM programs I already run?"

"No," we'd say. "One or two, maybe?" That's how many each of us used. To which the teenager would say, "Duh! I run eight." It started to dawn on us that our concept was flawed.

Our early adopters didn't think that having to learn a new IM program was a barrier.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201110/eric-ries-usability-testi...

I already mentioned this in another comment, but it's also relevant here: I don't understand why it's assumed that contact and identity isolation should lie at the service provider boundary.

People are able to manage multiple email addresses and phone numbers for work/personal/whatever without too many problems, and despite being against Facebook's terms of service many individuals already create more than one Facebook account to keep stuff separate ("I don't want my boss to see photos from that party last weekend"). In a standardized IM interop utopia I'd imagine that juggling multiple identities would be even more common.

In the past they were supporting XMPP but they deprecated that at some point.

OK, so Everlane is a (mostly, originally) online-only clothing retailer that started Facebook messaging me about my order status, including shipping updates. Obviously, this is when you've auth'd with them via Facebook. Messages can include html, including images and map data, so they used that to show tracking progress with some nice branding. I always wondered how they did that.

Nice use of the platform. If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.

Under what circumstances would one want to receive these sorts of messages over a Facebook message instead of via email?

> If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.

If I've authed with you, it does not mean I want you to message me through Facebook.

>> Under what circumstances would one want to receive these sorts of messages over a Facebook message instead of via email?

If you're the kind of person who instead asks "Under what circumstances would one want to receive these sorts of messages via email instead of over a Facebook message?"

Forgive me, I'm over 30. I barely want personal messages in Facebook as it is.

I'm 28 and I have a 50/50 mix of people using Facebook messenger just like a SMS. It's definitely a shift that is happening in people's comfort level with social media as a primary comm channel.

29, my parents and their friends 60, 70+ all use whatsapp instead of SMS. Whatsapp, Messenger, Google Talk, even Jabber… With modern smartphones it's all the same, the only difference is who's on what which is why I hated when everyone moved away from XMPP.

19, it's like 30/70 SMS/Facebook in my experience. (Then there's Snapchat, but that is more of an overlap than a replacement.) I think part of it is that Messenger handles groups well and everyone is on it without needing a number.

Frankly I hardly use Facebook-the-social-network much, but I use Messenger all the time.

For me: email provides a clear, searchable database that I can look over order histories. Chat, not so much.

I'm not saying "get off my lawn", I guess I just don't see the advantage of chat over email.

> If I've authed with you, it does not mean I want you to message me through Facebook.

That's the reason I never ever do any auth with FB. Platform can be turned off.

> If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.

Which is why I rarely auth with FB - I don't like the idea that someone is assuming I want a relationship with them beyond "sell me something - now go away",

> If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.

Authentication is not a declaration of preferences. Who wants to do any business communication over facebook? It's straight up terrible compared to, say, email.

In my anecdotal experience, a large share of the 16-20 year old crowd can barely remember their email address, let alone the password to it. They use it as much as I use my postal box.

You're still right that authentication doesn't imply authorization to send PMs, by the way.

It's a strange spectrum we now have in terms of business communication. The older population prefers to simply call you. The youngest population seems to prefer IMs or social media based communication (like company Facebook pages). The middle prefers e-mails.

Nice way to try and lock in more facebook users. If I ever encountered a business requiring Facebook for communication, that'd be the end of my patronage.

Facebook isn't doing a good job of masking their desire to force everyone onto their site (e.g. 'free internet' in India).

I've worked with the new Chat SDK and our customers' use cases aren't geared toward forcing (or even encouraging) users into using Facebook Messenger. Most of them are just trying to meet demand from their customers. In our particular case, we have customers with a lot of international travelers who have access to data while abroad but not necessarily SMS.

IMO it's a lot better than having a dedicated app you have to download to interact with a specific brand.

I agree that it's a nice option to have and I doubt many companies care to only provide one method of communication via Facebook. But there will be some, as there have been in the past that wouldn't let me register for their services since I didn't have facebook (Spotify at one point, another was a productivity app that was featured on HN).

It just seems like a slow creep by FB to become (as cliched as this is nowadays) 'too big to fail'.

The main reason as a developer that I'm trying to stop using anything related with the Facebook platform is that more and more of their APIs are private and only given access to a handful group of companies. This includes: messenger apis, graph apis, the recent shop/section tabs on pages, payments apis etc. It's becoming a huge walled garden.

Several years ago I made a program to create ad variations for Facebook Ads. I had to parse the page and submit the html forms because they wouldn't grant me API access. A huge list of companies had access, and most of them had pretty shitty apps to be honest.

I wrote a nice request for access, talking about the exciting features I'd like to use the Ads API for, and how it could help advertisers make more effective advertisements. They said no, and my business failed after a few months. My users were basically risking losing their Ads account by using the software, and it made marketing it very difficult.

I guess it pays to be connected, but it's difficult when you don't live near San Francisco, etc.

Pretty sure this wasn't actually a secret, they announced Messenger Business integrations months ago https://www.messenger.com/business ...

I'm seeing a fbchess option. @fbchess help returns:

@fbchess help Start game with random colors: @fbchess play Pick the colors: @fbchess play white/black Pick the opponent: @fbchess play white John

Make a move: use Standard Algebraic Notation @fbchess e4 or @fbchess Pe4 moves pawn to e4 Nbd2 to move knight from b-file to d2 B2xc5 to take on c5 with 2nd rank bishop e8=Q to promote pawn to queen 0-0-0 or O-O to castle

Claim draw (e.g. 3-fold repetition): @fbchess draw claim Offer a draw in the current position: @fbchess draw offer Offer an undo of the last move: @fbchess undo

Resign: @fbchess resign Show current position: @fbchess show Show stats between current players: @fbchess stats Continue a game from another conversation: @fbchess continue From 1:1 conversation, @fbchess continue with [friend] From group chat, @fbchess continue from [thread name]

@fbchess play actually initiates a game including a picture of the active chess board within the chat window.

IRC used to have all kinds of these bots back in the day. Mostly for downloading software. I remember even building one for the hell of it when I got bored one summer.

What's fascinating is the bot-bandwagon is mirroring the early app market.

With apps, you downloaded things to do things. With bots, you integrate them into things, so they'll do it for you. (Save extra step laziness)

What worries me is that that this mirroring also applies to the erection of giant walled gardens as well. It seems curious that this current bot-bandwagon has exploded after the XMPP interoperation world imploded. Different APIs now to build bots for Slack, Facebook, Google, Skype, etc...

I think it's in-combo with the whole AI/automated personalization as well. It used to be very difficult to do intelligent bots, but now you have tensorflow/caffe/word2vec frameworks that come built-in with NLP

The walled garden thing has always been an issue though. I mean Facebook threw a fit when India turned down their "facebook-only" internet: http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21685292-...

India didn't turn it down, it introduced it, and then other megacorps, Microsoft up front, lobbied until it got outlawed.

I've been looking for something like this ever since they deprecated their XMPP Chat API. I hope this goes public soon.

Pidgin has had a working plugin for a while: https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-facebook

Throw away for obvs reasons. Lately I've started hating using facebook. I get spam on my feeds. I get spam on my notifications. I don't really talk to friends there. I only contact friends on rare occasions when an opportunity comes by.

I do use messenger to talk to people close to me. Most of the time I use other platforms to talk to teams, groups of friends, etc.

If I start getting spam on my inbox I'm joining a new platform and deleting my facebook account. Most of the content I get there is garbage. The only reason I haven't left yet is because of the Messenger app.

> Throw away for obvs reasons.

Not super obvious to me, unless you work at Facebook. Is it really that much of a social taboo to delete your Facebook account?

I've been refusing to sign up for about 11 years now and I'm pretty OK with the social consequences.

I hope they do the same for Whatsapp. Telegram has this awesome feature where a bot can send a menu, that feature opens huge possibilities for self-service processes in businesses. Most native apps that business develop do just that (consult balance, fill forms, buy more services, etc). Why the need to make businesses develop custom apps and users install them/use them when chat apps are already installed and users already trained to use them. Furthermore, it is quite simple to avoid abuse (spam) for instance Telegram bots have acces to user IDs and nicks only, a bot cannot send spam to a phone number or email. At some point, if FB does not open its chat apps the opposite will occur: want to get fast, easy, awesome support from a business? Install Telegram and chat with its bot.

So you abandon open protocols, and then try to be yet another whatsapp / snapchat / hangouts / skype / whatever the hell.

Didn't we do this in the 90s? We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

And a decade later, the cycle repeats. Everyone walls up, tries to treat chat as this money pot, and I hope we can get back to open standards sooner rather than later. I'm sick and tired of not being able to talk to people easily and just resorting to email since thats the only common open protocol left people actually use.

We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

I think you are misinformed.

AIM: Never supported XMPP

Yahoo: Never supported XMPP

MSN: Never supported XMPP

What happened was that someone wrote code to send messages between them all. However, you still needed accounts on each for it to work.

Source:

No service can talk to all services. This means in order to talk to contact X, you must have an account on the same service as contact X, or on any compatible service.

  If you have an account on AIM, ICQ, or MobileMe, you can chat with anybody who uses AIM, ICQ, MobileMe, or SMS.


  If you have an account on XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal, you can chat with anybody who uses XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal.

  In the official clients, MSN users can chat with Yahoo! users but this is not yet supported by Adium.

Some XMPP ("Jabber") servers (mostly private ones) allow chats with proprietary services such as AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! via a mechanism called "XMPP transports".

https://adium.im/help/pgs/Accounts-ListOfServices.html

I assume he was referring rather to Google and Facebook which both supported XMPP at some point.

That would be correct. Unfortunately the author appears to believe otherwise. I quote: We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

I think the context is pretty clear.

The monetization possibilities here are unbelievable. Have keys to a platform with a billion users that use a product this often? I would kill for access :)

In South America (and I guess Asia too), access to WhatsApp would be even bigger - and it's Facebook owned...

On the other end of this - this sucks. Anyone who has a Facebook page now has users encouraged to message them (and you get scored if you respond too late). Just found out this out later & it's a headache when you're trying to funnel people through your actual customer service channels and not trying to handle things on Facebook. ugh.

If your goal is to have ecstatically happy customers, you may want to begin thinking about your customer service channels as wherever your customers want to talk to you, versus where you want to talk to them.

I know its a lot of work / not possible for all businesses / makes running the business more difficult, but hopefully minimizing unhappy customers should result in sales growth which offsets the investment in customer service.

That's true, but by directing people to where we CAN help them & track their data / info, we're better able to do that.

It'd be great as an "optional" feature, but the fact that they enable it automatically & grade you on that basis is a bit ridiculous.

Would software that unified your owned channels vs their owned channels help you here with data/info unification help you here?

Don't most customer service platforms support Facebook now? Salesforce certainly does: http://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/features/social-cust...

Glad thats too late. At least in my environment Facebook communication pretty much died out. I always wanted a bot, actually i always do on any platform, and i hated that they made it so super hard.

I may will use this for Advertisment tho once it gets public. I heard people on Facebook love to get ads thrown at their faces.

Hey make up some cool stuff with interesting ideas so we can change terms and steal your entire business, thanks!

So, what IRC has had for all its life?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com