Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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> When Google announced XMPP federation, it felt like it could be the start of something better. It wasn't. Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo didn't play along and even big third parties that used XMPP wanted to keep a walled-garden. But when Google kiled federation, it was a blow (at least to me). It meant that it wasn't going to happen.

Nobody's built the killer realtime messaging app yet. Skype is the closest we have, and it sucks on the iPhone and has no web interface so it doesn't run on ChromeOS.

WhatsApp doesn't work on tablets and requires a phone number as your primary identity.

Facebook and Twitter DM have become large, but aren't there yet because they don't do video/voice and don't federate (and at least in Twitter's case, don't sync read/unread between devices). iMessage and FaceTime would be it, bar none, if it worked on non-Apple hardware - if only from the bootstrap momentum of every single iOS user.

There is opportunity here. If I wanted to be in the software development business, I would solve this problem and eat WhatApp's lunch.

Ideally it'd be federated, but that's not a hard requirement. It just needs to work perfectly on every device that every person sends and receives messages from. That's not that hard these days, which is why it's baffling that nobody's built it yet.

I have an inkling that Hangouts is attempting to become that thing. If indeed that's their plan, they will easily crush Skype.

I've actually had an idea in the back of my head for an extensible JSON IM/Presence system, maybe it's time to get to work on that.

XMPP was never really meant to be in my opinion, it had a bunch of great ideas but it failed in implementation (choosing XML was a bad start).

http://xkcd.com/927/

Don't go down that path. Just write a library once to speak XMPP (or use an existing one) and then don't ever think about XML again. But please don't proliferate Yet Another Standard for a problem that was fully solved a decade ago. (XMPP also has well-defined standard ways of extending on top of it. Color inside the lines, not because they're good, but because it's worse to draw new ones unique to you.)

Except you can't ever 'not think about XML' when using XMPP, especially when working with it's "well-defined ways of extending on top of it" that completely destroy any sanity that XML is supposed to provide. If you're using XML without a sane schema you might as well be using some binary format because it's about as easy to work with.

XML streams, are you kidding? Who thought that making an XML parser read a mal-formed document (because it's never a complete document until the stream ends!) was a good idea! You can't even use the standard XML parser in most languages without separating out the individual responses in the stream, which aren't delineated by anything sane like a newline, but instead by a closing tag, meaning you get to sit and parse XML as it comes in, waiting for the message to be closed (and lord help you if your code doesn't handle the possibility that you'll get sent malformed data).

XMPP sucks, I'm sorry, it just does. XML is not the appropriate solution to use for anything with a persistent stream, it's got shitty error recovery and requires far too much work to parse correctly even when you can guarantee you have a completely well formed document before you even start parsing it.

"If only we hadn't done XMPP in XML, then it would have all worked out!"

Do you see how absurd that sounds?

The problem is fundamentally different from a technical problem. The problem is that there's nothing in it from any of the big providers to support federation. It just causes them to leak users, which they don't want.

The only reason Google ever support it was because for a while they were run by engineers instead of businessmen.

XML didn't kill federation, it just formed the base of a poorly designed IM and presence protocol. Federation was a great idea, but you're right, it always ends up getting killed because people want to keep their users.

Unfortunately too many businesses don't see that it's easier to keep customers when you provide them value, not when you prevent them from leaving.

Ha, even people here can't see the value in decentralization and peer-to-peer connection. Startups think "we'll just get enough users on our proprietary network; ???; profit!" and big companies want the lockin.

Hangouts does everything I need and it does it exceedingly well, but I hate using it knowing how locked in I am.

I use iMessage constantly, and while the lock-in bugs me theoretically, everyone I need to talk to regularly uses iOS, so it does not actually practically affect me very often.

The last time I can recall it being an issue was when I went to message someone who was SMS-only from my iPad. The whole SMS-overloading thing for iMessage is the most effective/profitable marketing decision Apple has ever made, I think.

I mean, when Hangouts finished Voice integration it will do all of that and more. It can already cross conference in VoIP and PTSN users, when they finish GV integration, you'll just text/chat with another Hangouts user and it won't matter if they're on their smartphone, dumbphone or laptop.

Unless of course you're not on a Google sanctioned platform, guess I don't get in on all the fun because I decided to buy a Windows Phone.

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