Comment by nickjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjackson | Hacker News Reader

While the app looks pretty cool and I have no beef with the app specifically, introducing yet another IM app is just going to fragment the market further and cause more issues than it solves.

There are so many different ways to communicate currently, that soon we aren't going to be sure what app to best contact a particular person with. You've got Email, SMS, iMessage, Facebook (Chat), WhatsApp, Twitter, and those are just are some of the top ways.

Everyone has their favourites and because of this, communication is getting more annoying and difficult purely because of the diversity of choice. Its not helped by large companies vendor locking their customers into a specific way of messaging, fully knowing that not all of the people they contact are there.

I have a strong opinion on this yet I have no real solution.

Whats the chances of the top tech companies coming together to create and implement a secure open protocol and/or app allowing end users to message anyone regardless of platform? I guess its pretty bonkers.

Yeah, that exact thing already exists, it's called XMPP/Jabber but hardly anyone uses it. It's a shame. There is a federated chat protocol just like federated email, but it's businesses trying to lock in customers that is causing all of these communication problems.

In a perfect world Google, Apple, Mozilla, etc would just contribute new features to the codebase, and everyone could have their own client interfaces and do unique team apps etc

*Bonus points: Jabber chat protocol addresses are the same as email addresses, they are interchangeable. One less thing to list on your business card. Socially, this mindset would potentially shift into just being called an 'address' instead of assuming it's only for email.

I have noticed we're running into this right now with iMessage, Facetime etc in giving out an 'email address' to do connect doing something other than emailing.

Ironically, Whatsapp started out by using ejabberd — the XMPP server written in Erlang — as their main chat infrastructure, and then modified it to the point where it no longer implements XMPP.

And google talk and facebook chat both used xmpp, and are both(?) avoiding federation -- and both(?) phasing out even supporting xmpp clients.

For a little while I actually bothered using IM, as I actually had someone to talk to (most of my friends had facebook or gtalk -- and I could talk to them in the same interface I used for xmpp at work) -- and I could keep all the logs in one place (if I needed them) -- and it all supported secure texts (OTR).

Now all my friends have access to crappy html5 chat silos that I'd rather not touch with a stick if I can help it. The things are all but impossible to use in a sane way without having to use a mouse -- and even if I could use them, I can't aggregate the logs, keep them independently of whether or not I keep the account(s) and I can't have access to everything in one application.

Why would anyone use this or slack.com rather than setting up a jabber server? If you desperately want to restrict your choice of interface, you could always deploy a html5 jabber client, and pretend there aren't good native clients out there. I'm not sure why anyone would do that, though.

HipChat actually supports XMPP, if you don't want to use the native apps. Doubt it's popular enough that services like Slack will do it too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com