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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

So, to be clear, Google is supposed to make video chat with groups of people, recording to YouTube, desktop sharing, and Google Docs live editing work with XMPP? Or else they're evil?

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I don't care too much about video chat, YouTube, etc, etc… Just about the plain old XMPP/Jabber user-to-user that was the base for Google Talk and that has been around for many years. The ability to talk with users from different providers.

That is being open. Without XMPP federation, we're effectively locked into Google. And it's just a matter of time that they drop XMPP altogether and we have to use their own protocol for chatting.

Considering that they only enabled federation again a little while ago it's not like that's something new.

They enabled federation months after Google Talk came out actually.

And then they disabled it a good while ago except for a few servers that they had whitelisted, thus my "again".

If they're not using XMPP, they should publish their new protocol and let other clients interface with it.

Well it was announced yesterday, so the HN assertion seems to be that if you don't launch with XMPP, you're evil.

Are you implying they have tried (with xmpp-extensions)?

But yes, they are evil.

Well I do hope they intend to use WebRTC and WebM for Hangouts soon.

WebRTC is a network overlay, not messaging protocol. You could use XMPP w/ WebRTC just as well.

The company with half the top Phds and best engineers in the world and billions in profit every quarter is unable to create an open extension to XMPP to accomplish those and fallback gracefully if it's not supported? You really believe that?

You could assemble a team of 30 random HN posters and they would be able to do that.

So, I think they could do it, if and only if they wanted to. But they didn't and they themselves said it was because they didn't want to be open.

I think that you should assemble your team of thirty random people on HN and get them to do that thing that you want them to do. Good luck!

The hypothesized "video chat" protocol extension to XMPP already exists and it's called Jingle. FOSS client support isn't great, but it is progressing. So if this service isn't open to FOSS clients, that's more an issue of strategy than resources. (And indeed, the decision might change in future and be attributed to improved FOSS client performance.) If the service is indeed closed, however, they probably ought to update this page:

https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications

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