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Comment by reidrac | Hacker News Reader

Can someone confirm Google is killing XMPP and its server-to-server federation?

The Verge says Hangouts is not using XMPP but does it mean that XMPP (Google Talk) is definitely going away?

Well, the quote from The Verge is the following: "Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very 'open' XMPP standard that it helped pioneer."

That's for the new Hangouts service. If you can keep using XMPP with your Gmail account, then it's not that terrible. I don't know if it's a forced replacement.

We may need to wait for Google's announcement.

"Not federated support, but supports interop with XMPP clients. Meaning you can continue to use XMPP clients to log in to Google Talk and those messages will interop with folks on Hangouts."

https://plus.google.com/107968525907303243288/posts/HFe3W7A9...

So Google Talk will continue to live on (which allows them to implement some sort of server side functionality which converts a Gtalk message to a Hangout message when both members have activated Hangouts), it's just not actively being worked on.

So really the only effective change is the Chrome extension and Android apps have been replaced so you have to use a 3rd party Jabber client if you do want to use GTalk on those platforms.

Thanks for the info!

EDIT: well, not really good news as they kill the federated support.

In another comment there he also says "for the time being" so you can expect this to disappear in a year or so.

Being forced to use a third party client will hopefully improve the quality of the third party clients. I hate how the current gtalk android app forces you to see/use all Google accounts configured on your phone and there is no way to reliably turn off never logging into one (say, an account you are trying to deprecate). Unfortunately, every other XMPP client for android has some serious deficiency (often a terrible UI).

I use Xabber and I'm very happy with it:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xabber.and...

But if I can't talk with my contacts using a Gmail account, then is not that useful.

They clearly announced that Talk is deprecated and will be replaced by Hangout. See this statement on their developer site: https://developers.google.com/talk/

They are not in short term. But do you expect them to keep it going when they have alternative, preferred way of doing and limited resources?

The idea that Google has limited resources, in any practical manner, is laughable.

Google already does some kind of charity work, it would be interesting to see them support the continued development of open protocols as side projects to their main offering. This would be the cost of a handful of developers per project/protocol. But they didn't want to support even the small group that was working on Reader, which used to be a core business offering.

It would be interesting if it happened. I wouldn't hold my breath.

It doesn't matter if their resources are huge, which they are. They are finite and they have shown, lately quite often, that they don't want to spend them even on things which are relatively popular if they don't see strategic value in them.

Are you really arguing that keeping GTalk around as a competitor to their G+ messenger/hangout/whatever client will help them long term?

I posted about it 2 months back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388095

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