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Comment by myzerox | Hacker News Reader

They're buying access to a winner-take-all market.

Remember when we had standards and interoperability?

Why would messaging be a winner-take-all market? I mean, it's just pushing around a bunch of bytes. Shouldn't be too difficult to specify.

> Remember when we had standards and interoperability?

And the carriers charged 20 cents per SMS [1]? Yup, I remember those days. No thanks.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5832245/atts-new-text-plan-overcharges-yo...

It's because of network effects.

(I'm not going to switch to the 2nd best app where I can only reach 10% of my friends.)

But the network effects are still there if you have an interoperable standard. You can use _any_ app that supports the standard and still connect to everybody in the social network.

There is no reason why the social network of mankind should remain captured in the userbase of a single messaging app. And it is the abstract social network that does provide the network effects.

Google tried to get everybody onto jabber. It didn't work and they fell behind, so now we have hangouts.

Did they _really_ try though? Google sometimes fails to appreciate that just "putting it out there" isn't enough.

Funny enough, they also fail to see that forcing people to adopt something doesn't work either. For a company that lives off advertising, they sure don't show much skill at marketing.

I didn't get which inbox messages would hit, in your scenario.

Would I be required to install a new app for checking an additional inbox?

There are some technical quirks if it is supposed to be a decentralized system but still tied to your telephone number as account identification/address. You'd obviously want to be as independent as possible from your service provider, especially here in Europe, where it is possible to take the phone number with you when changing providers.

It'd probably have to be a system where the server must verify that the number actually belongs to you by sending you a "traditional" SMS with an access code. You'd also need a trust network among the servers or else there would be servers announcing every telephone number out there as theirs.

Regarding the app, I guess any app that supports the protocol would do, even ones that also do other things. This should produce a healty app ecosystem.

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