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Comment by jspark | Hacker News Reader

Does facebook follow an open standard for their messaging system?

Also add WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, Kik.

Google is getting clobbered in the messaging space by these apps. If Google thinks they can move faster by dropping XMPP support, I'm fine with it.

Imagine if Google sticks with XMPP and continue to lose market share in messaging. They might have to shut down Talk. We know what happens when Google sunsets a product, lots of angry people.

Lose-lose situation for Google here.

It's XMPP at core, but - AFAIK - they also do not support server-to-server federation. So you can connect to Facebook chat with any XMPP compatible client, but if you run your own ejabberd server, you can't connect to your server, and then message your Facebook friends.

It's not. As https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ explains, "Facebook Chat should be compatible with every XMPP client, but is not a full XMPP server. It should be thought of as a proxy into the world of Facebook Chat on www.facebook.com.

It's "XMPP enough" in this contenxt. It's XMPP, it just isn't complete XMPP, might be a better way of putting it.

That's not to say I wouldn't like to see them improve their support for all of XMPP though.

Er, so isn't that the exact same situation as Google? You can still connect with any XMPP client, but XMPP support is now just a proxy into the world of Hangouts.

xmpp clients do not work with Google Hangouts

Yes, my pidgin is working just fine right now. You have to log in through a google account now, you can't connect through a federated account, but AFAIK all previous XMPP clients still work just fine.

It supports client federation, not server federation. Server federation is what it allows XMPP servers to send messages between each other, while client federation allows for other clients to connect over XMPP.

What I don’t quite get is how server federation is much more difficult than ‘client federation’. s2s XMPP looks extremely similar to s2c XMPP, and since they still have s2c XMPP, they don’t seem to have a problem with only exposing parts of their architecture via XMPP.

Really, I can only think of laziness and trying to build a walled garden as reasons to support c2s but not s2s connections.

Both of which are not exactly good explanations for one of the largest companies in software engineering.

As stated by Google officially, and by all accounts of everyone using external clients, XMPP works fine. Federation doesn't, just like with Facebook as mentioned above.

Even though Facebook uses XMPP, they aren't federated, so they are cut off from the rest of the XMPP network. Therefore the benefit of them using XMPP extends only on using different clients. I.e. it's half good, half bad.

Sort of? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/

Facebook chat is XMPP, yes, if that's what you are asking.

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