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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

Hyperbole aside (they won’t drop SMTP) that is a very narrow and unfair view on the situation, they at least tried for years to make it work with these standards and failed.

They were obviously the last ones doing so, and this new approach is mainly about modernising their infrastructure.

Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP?

Google was the last one standing, and it just didn't work out.

And why cherry pick “standards”? how about web standard? Chromium is a very big commitment to them.

Edit: I should be more specific as I meant a federated implementation of XMPP.

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Lync 2013 fully supports XMPP federation. Cisco's IM offerings support XMPP federation. IBM's Sametime supports XMPP federation.

Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers.

As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?

Lync's native protocol is SIP, a standard that Google could also have adopted years ago, but they went with the more modern and 'better' competing XMPP standard.

Microsoft went through a lot of problems implementing SIP it for Lync and its predecessors LCS and OCS, but they remained within the standard and worked on interoperability and improving the standard around security, even if it took more time than going it alone.

The roles of Microsoft and Google have certainly switched around.

Lync looks really nice with that

edit: XMPP federation feature is not available in Ofice365 Lync options, that's sad

To be fair, while the Office suite itself is pretty decent these days, Office 365 is terrible. Microsoft is still very much a software company and not a services company.

If you are talking about Office web-apps, maybe. But what is wrong with their hosted Exchange and SharePoint?

If IBM's Sametime supported launching without crashing, it would be a better feature than their XMPP federation.

Coincidentally, only yesterday I installed an XMPP daemon on one of my servers and configured it as a message relay so I can send and receive SMS from my PC via my phone.

Facebook chat also uses XMPP.

So in answer to your question: yes, there are people still building new stuff on top of XMPP.

However I will concede that I'm also a bit IRC advocate - so I'm probably the wrong person to comment on the best newest social protocols.

the best newest social protocols.

Better known as "reinvention of shit that already worked because we want to lock you into our platform and monetize your eyeballs."

No one is taking xmpp away from your server or the applications that are using it; but take Facebook: did they do any effort of integrating their chat with the Gmail one?

You're missing my point. The previous poster stated that nobody was using XMPP and I was simply stating that wasn't true.

I'm not worried that Google might someone how hack into my server and kill XMPP on that, nor am I commenting on the level of the Facebook Chat integration with the wider XMPP community (in fact the reason I run my own XMPP server was to have a private channel, so I can completely understand why Facebook have chosen to do so as well).

My comment was just stating that XMPP is still widely used - despite other peoples claims that Google were it's only supporters.

"but take Facebook"

...

PLEASE!

:-D

(with apologies to Henny Youngman -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Youngman)

I'd love to read how you set that up. Any links you can point me to?

The SMS thing? It's basically just an Android app (gtalksms [1]). But I wanted a private encrypted network to control it from (I actually go further and then hook the XMPP server into bitlbee which is an IRC server for IM clients. So now I can control my phone, Twitter, Facebook Chat and Windows Messenger all from Irssi.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/gtalksms/

> Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP?

I use XMPP to talk with Google Talk users from an XMPP account hosted on my own server. I will be annoyed if Google users are driven away from Google Talk to something that I cannot interact with unless I use a Google account.

Same here; and it's not like it's hard. If you're running a web server and/or DNS, it's as easy as 'apt-get install ejabberd', tweak some well documented settings in the config file, add a few lines to the DNS config, and bam! I'm talking to my friends on GTalk via my own private XMPP server.

Other than a basic understanding of what it is, I don't know anything about XMPP. What's wrong with it? Or, more specifically, what does it do poorly that other things have eclipsed?

It is federated in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to establish new features, as there are a multitude of servers and clients, which would all have to support said new features for them to stick.

Some see that as an advantage, but it definitely doesn’t help ‘innovate’ and re-invent the wheel every other month. GPG encryption, for example, while standardised in XEP-something, is still not really supported in widely available clients. OTR encryption is more of a layer atop the actual protocol and hence somewhat inelegant (and also not that widely available).

Also it’s XML-based, which could be argued is even worse than base64, but that should be a rather small concern given how popular JSON and the likes are nowadays.

But Google, as a wealthy company and the controller of such a big chunk of the XMPP user base, was (maybe uniquely) in a good position to overcome these problems. It could have established a de facto standard set of supported features, and maybe pushed out some code to help clients implement awkward bits of it.

Web "standards" are a carve-up between a de-facto closed group of four (recently down from five) browser vendors.

Isn't Facebook chat XMPP?

Yes, but AFAIK it is not federated, i.e. you cannot talk with Facebook chat users without a Facebook account.

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