Google Talk for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Google Talk for Developers

developers.google.com

130 pointsovechtrick40 comments

I'll take this opportunity to kindly request that someone build an alternative to gTalk and Skype for video chatting. The forums for both are filled with complaints that do not ever get answered. Both products are huge resource hogs – gTalk will freeze my browser and Skype repeatedly disconnects and just slows down my entire machine. And it seems to happen to many, many people out there. On top of that, we all know Google offers little to no customer service, and it seems as if the Skype folks have just completely abandoned addressing any issues.

I've said this before: we are long, long overdue for a gTalk/Skype killer for video chat. At this point, I'm willing to pay for something better.

I agree we're overdue for a Skype killer. The technology that's going to power it is called "WebRTC".

http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/

Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8C8ouiXHHk

You can play with WebRTC now in Google Chrome. Enable the chrome://flags: http://www.webrtc.org/running-the-demos

Then play with this demo: https://webrtc-demos.appspot.com/html/gum1.html

Then play with the source code: http://code.google.com/p/webrtc-samples/source/browse/#svn%2...

Have fun!

I think that multiple peer connection support has landed in Chrome. Time to integrate the ROAP over JSEP and fix my code up and I should have a basic multi-peer p2p video chat demo working.

Please don't build another 'You should "upgrade" your browser to Chrome' service.

WebRTC might be cool, the demo looks cool, but the official site says that it might break or go away anytime and - please, please, please never ignore this - only one single browser seems to support that tech.

Fool around with it, but this can _never_ be part of a Skype killer until everyone can use it.

Someone could (and should!) take the webrtc c++ libraries and use those to create their own native client app -- which would not be dependent on the Chrome browser.

You are aware that Skype requires the Skype client, even less standards-based than Chrome, and everyone can use it? You can use Chrome and Skype alongside your web browser of choice. Chrome is spritually like the Mozilla/XUL of old -- it's a platform for apps, not just a web browser.

I betting Opera and Firefox will implement it. They already have the getUserMedia api for the mic and camera.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/04/webrtc-efforts-underway-at-...

Sure beats a "you should install our binary" service. WebRTC is also an open standard backed by the W3C and will have support in other browsers soon (FireFox/Opera/IE, no word yet from Apple).

Support is already being added in Firefox. Skype posted a position a while back about a WebRTC hire. I'm not sure why people act like it's some fringe thing. It's already not.

_never_ really?

step 1 - download dev version of chrome into a separate folder

step 2 - enable webrtc in flags://

step 3 - put a shortcut on your Desktop that points to this and says "Skype-NG" or something like that.

How is that different now than going and clicking on Skype from running and launching point of view. Bonus points, can also browse the web if you want.

Skype also might break or might go away anytime too. Or, rather, more likely will interrupt your video stream every 5 minutes to show you adds about dating sites and Nigerian scams.

how about:

1. download some 1MB binary. No depends or 3rd lib runtime or shit.

2. BAM! Voice and video group chat. S2S federated with all other XMPPs.

So both are pretty easy and neither is unrealistically impossible as the grandparent suggested...

I'm currently building support for this into Candy, a multiuser javascript based xmpp client:

http://candy-chat.github.com/candy-webrtc/

If everything works, candy should be able to connect to gTalk as well, at some point. (Uses Jingle for transferring SDP to the participant).

Also please make it extremely secure and encrypted. Microsoft and Skype are doing the world a huge disservice right now by making Skype fully wiretappable by any and all law enforcement agencies and even the police in US. The world deserves better.

And, let me guess, you don't want to pay any money for this?

Really? We're still throwing out this extremely inaccurate information? Honestly? All they did was change supernodes for directory lookups. Almost every time the data is peer-to-peer unless someone is behind full-cone-NAT which REQUIRES tunneling the data.

If you're going to downvote, at least mention why.

I use Google Talk via Empathy (and Telepathy) and it works very well; it appears to be extremely stable and the call quality is decent. Video worked when I tested it, but it's not something I use regularly. Empathy is improving - it's not quite as nice to use as some other IM clients, but it does what I need it to do.

http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

There's an XMPP extension for voice/video called Jingle, which a number of open source clients implement - one of them is Empathy, but I think Pidgin has a voice/video branch as well (or had it the last time I looked). Gtalk actually uses Jingle as well, so it's interoperable.

That said, one of the problems with open source solutions is that you often need a proxy (usually then both parties are behind nat), which opensource apps obviously can't provide/maintain.

On linux Empathy, Gajim, Jitsi, and Pidgin all support audio and video chat. I believe they're all interoperable with each other and with the video chat in gmail.

I think that Jitsi (formerly named SIP Communicator) supports audio and video chat on Windows and OS X as well.

https://jitsi.org/

Not sure, GTalk the Windows app at least is not compatible and the browser plugin seems not to be either, because Google uses a pre-standard version of Jingle that is not supported by Gajim. They claimed to update the client.. some years ago, nothing happened.

You refering to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689512 ?

This is absolute hogwash. Google Talk moved away from the standards it was built on a long time ago and this token gesture does nothing to make it any easier for developers to integrate their systems. If Google really wanted to be open, here's what they would do:

* Create an XEP for the method they use for history replay so that other clients and servers can get in on that goodness

* Implement XEPs that the most popular XMPP clients have that Talk does not (for example contact sharing so you can use transports without having to click "yes" to adding a contact 200 times)

* Either bring their Jingle in-line with the standard /which they helped create/ or create a new version of the standard incorporating their proprietary changes

* Release the protocol that the Google Talk Android app uses. It's proprietary, slimmed-down, and means that any other XMPP client or GTalk client on Android is at a huge disadvantage in terms of sign-in time and data usage.

Allow me to connect to GTalk via webSocket and I'll do the rest. Appengine already support xmpp bots so it would be a piece of cake to manage presence, stanzas, etc.

That's all I ask for:

    ws = new WebSocket('ws://talk.google.com:5222')

What's so special about this? I thought it was common knowledge that Google Talk was on Jabber/XMPP.

I think this now allows people to write clients that can also use voice and video chat through Talk.

>Last updated March 23, 2012.

Doesn't look like there has been any recent changes that warrant being on the front page.

Hmm, good point.

This was already possible years ago. I used a patched Psi (XMPP) client for VoIP calls to Google Talk clients in 2006 (IIRC).

I agree and recently started working on a peer-to-peer, audio/video chat client called twelephone - here's a demo of the WebRTC-based project as of this weekend. http://youtu.be/9GvBe0kCJGI

If you're looking for Java alternative to libjingle (which is written in C++) then I can recommend Jitsi (https://jitsi.org/). From what I understand they are more or less compatible with each other.

Also check out the fantastic OpenFire XMPP server written in hava, works great with http-bind, strophe.js and even custom XMPP filters in javascript. Now we just have to solve the elusive clustering issue with an open-source alternative.

And now if they could combine Google Voice and Google Talk into a combined product....

Don't forget Messenger! I wish they'd at least have a desktop or web client for it.

Its high time that they also released an api for google voice[1] . If there are any googlers reading this: why has this not been done yet? I've been looking into this in my spare time as there is no google voice client for Meego (Nokia N9) and I wanted to write one/improve an existing one[2]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1668619/is-there-a-google...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/qgvdial/

My perception for all of this is that Google Voice is a deeply controversial project to people like cellphone networks, who Google need for Android. That's why we haven't seen APIs, VOIP calling, etc. It seems to be stuck in a rut, and I suspect it's political rather than technical.

Wait, Jingle supports file transfers, but Google Chat currently doesn't?

Up until at last something like one year ago Google Chat didn't even support the full Jingle spec, but only Google's Jingle-like variant.

It depends on the Chat client. The older Talk windows client supports file transfers.

http://www.google.com/talk/about.html

That sucks, I guess for iChat or Messages to support file transfers with Gmail they'd have to have a specific Account Type for GChat which implements Jingle extensions, instead of just going through Jabber.

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