Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app | Hacker News Reader

Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

mwmeyer.com

43 pointsmwmeyer52 comments

>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication.

Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems worse now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revision.

It is worse. If you try to run an online IM aggregator like the Meebo of old, Microsoft (Skype) will block your IPs and Blizzard (BNet chat) or Facebook (WhatsApp) will sue you off the face of the earth.

What's more, many services in this category have recently gone from trying to make the world better to trying to make it worse. eBuddy and imo.im shut down their IM aggregators entirely to build their own private IM networks, which, of course, are interoperable with nothing.

Disclaimer: I worked at imo.im

I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on my own what I might have done to get my account disabled.

The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (over gtalk XMPP) is only used for this one thing -- Pidgin IM with my coworkers. 2 of my coworkers google accounts they created for this purpose were also disabled on the same day. When I created a new google account, it was disabled within an hour.

My normal personal google account I use for gmail, and my business google account I use for google apps, still works without a hitch. The only thing I can assume, is that Google no longer allows you to use them exclusively for XMPP instant messaging - unless you use their google talk interface built into gmail.

Especially frustrating because there is no way to tell if this is true. I'm just taking a guess, because that's all I can do. If there's some other reason my account might have been disabled, there's no way for me to find out. Now I'm worried about the lifespan of my other google accounts. Don't really know what to do, because Google won't give me any information about what I did wrong. But it makes me afraid they might one day shut down my gmail account also, without telling me why or giving me any means to find out why.

Some google products I like, and some I don't. I hate google+, for example. But webmail is something I rely on, and until yesterday, gmail was such a slick implementation that I had no reason to investigate using anything else. Now I realize relying on a behemoth corp for something that's mission-critical (to me) may no longer be acceptable.

It's ironic and a little bit weird (in a Twilight Zone kind of way), that Google seems to be behaving more and more like the Microsoft of old, and yet I'm watching the annual MS developer conference that's taking place this week (channel9.msdn.com for the video), and the things they're doing -- git support in team foundation server, universal apps built in JS that work on pc/tablet/phone/xbox (and maybe ios/android soon through cooperation with xamarin), open-sourcing the .net compiler, etc -- make them seem like more like the google of a decade ago.

Creepy. I'm not sure how to react.

One possibility is that you and your coworkers are creating multiple google accounts which are being used from the same IP (your work's IP) simultaneously, and since there isn't any history (like email, search, etc) on those accounts then you're setting off Google's spam detector.

Not a good situation. I agree that it sucks. But... well, honestly and unfortunately, your best bet is to write a blog post about the injustice and hope HN picks it up.

This is a good idea. As far as I know, HN is Google's primary support channel. I am looking forward to the post.

It's the inevitable turn of the wheel of history. The company on top inevitably succumbs to the desire to add some tie-in here, some lock-in there, some EEE all over... Meanwhile the company with less to lose sees less risk in opening up whatever they have to get traction...the only thing that changes is the name of the companies involved, and definitely not the human nature of the people running them.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. As of right now Google is still a considerably better and more accomplished OSS citizen than Microsoft. They deserve applause and success (and have certainly gotten plenty of both!). But in another few product cycles? Who knows...

Uh, didn't Google announce a long time ago that they shut down the xmpp end points because it was only used by spammers? Yeah the internet revolted for the 2 usual minutes but then a kitten passed by...

Do you know why imo dropped their interopability? Were they pushed or did they really believe that they could strike out on their own?

I have not been at imo recently enough to say. Georges talked to Time about it[0]. My guess is that nobody has been given $19B for making the world more open and connected, only for making yet another walled garden.

[0]: http://time.com/13461/why-imo-dropped-third-party-im-support...

We already have open standards for unified communication: H.323 (old), XMPP and SIP.

Also there are a lot of companies using and/or offering great software based on these open protocols: check Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/) or Mizutech full stack offer (http://www.mizu-voip.com/).

There is only one problem: When VoIP companies grows, all of them are switching to (at least partially) proprietary protocols.

There is a big hype now around Twilio. However there were apps like that even before solving the same problem. For example mizutech SIP webphone also has a nice javascript API and it is completely SIP compatible (without the need to use any third party obfuscating cloud service like in the case of Twilio. It will just connect directly to any SIP server ...without the cloud hype).

It just seems that technology or open protocols doesn't matter too much. The winner solution was and always will be the solution offered by the company with better marketing.

We have XMPP, but http://op-co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/

When my friends tried to convince me i should pay for whatsapp i almost physically attacked one when i finally understood it was an im client.

So, yeah, you're spot on.

Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious.

WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are moving off of WhatsApp and end up (back?) with Skype, Threema, Telegram, Hangout, Facebook. No, not TextSecure. That's generally unknown all around me.

Out of these services I hate Skype, Hangout and Facebook with a passion. I like the Telegram marketing, but I'm skeptical and .. probably won't ever use it. Threema is the closed [1] thing I would consider, but even that is a compromise I'm not going to make.

For a long time now I'm telling my friends to 'just email me, or call'. Yes, I do use mail like IM all the time. It works, while all of the products above don't - for my definition of 'works'.

edit: 1: I meant 'closest', but 'closed' is such a good typo in that case - I'll leave it in. It's both.

There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant.

Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.

My mail clients have push support.

Look, I'm not saying 'Use mail for IM' nor do I claim that this is ideal. I'm saying that this is what I resort to because that's the _only_ thing that works.

In my world, there _is_ no IM solution. I don't have the necessary clients - or my friends don't. Or a subset of the people I want to reach are on a different service (Friend A & B on Hangout, C is using WA or Threema). The IM you talk about? It doesn't exist in my world and only therefor mail qualifies as 'as good as possible, given the environment'.

And .. if that makes 'IM' less like (each * a new message)

* Hi.

* You there?

* What are you doing?

* What about a beer tonight?

and leads to

"Hey, want to have a beer tonight?"

(still 'instant', as in 'reaches me in seconds and reply might! be equally fast) - all the better.

I don't think there's any technological reason why email should necessarily be slower than IM, that's something of an accident of history in the technology.

What's wrong with Hangouts? Skype has been desyncy and slow for me, but my only issue with Hangouts so far has been that almost nobody else uses it.

It's odd that, despite there being an open protocol for realtime chat that is over 25 years old, older than HTTP or HTML, I would guess that the majority of the population hasn't heard of or used it. On the other hand, almost everyone has heard of and uses email, which also dates from around the same time period.

> A unified communication service would not only allow me to communicate easily on any device it makes sense to, it would also unify the 3 main communication formats into one platform: voice, video, and messaging.

The closest to that seems to be SIP and its related protocols, but they don't seem all that popular for some reason.

Which protocol are you referring to - IRC? talkd?

Voice and video are fundamentally different from messaging because they are connection-orientated; I think it's a mistake to conflate the two.

SIP is actually pretty good when the firewall punching works. I suspect there are enough cases when it doesn't for that to be a problem. And of course, if it's hard to monetise then it's hard to advertise, hence the proprietary push.

IRC.

I see how messaging doesn't need to be connection-oriented, but in many cases it is (especially if you want near-realtime latency, and not "whenever the next poll is".)

I'd say because they're hard (or at least tricky and not trivial) to implement and rely on more infrastructure than a lean startup wants to maintain and once you do, you again have a separate service that doesn't interoperate with anybody, but now your technology stack is an order of magnitude larger than the competition's and therefore more prone to breakage.

Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could only email, message and communicate members within each service.

Back to the future...

And then on the 90s you had icq, aol, yahoo and another dozen instant messagers. Then Google played the bait and switch with jabber support for gtalk and came social networks and everyone having a sms phone in their pockets and all that became irrelevant...

Did we just defined the instant messager life cycle in 10yrs?

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again .. and again .. and again ...

IRC. Solving problems we shouldn't have in the first place since the dawn of the Internet.

I just want to point out that our current internet is not http-based. It's ip-based. The World Wide Web is http-based but that's not the same as the Internet.

This would be nit-picking, except it's not. There is a global unified standard for communication. It's called the Internet Protocol (ip for short). If we moved SMS messages off SMS and onto ip we have WhatsApp (or any other superficially similar service). If you want to stop using SMS because it doesn't work over ip, then there are a few dozen messaging apps that will run on your phone and allow you to send and receive messages over ip. This, after all, was the driver behind WhatsApp's growth: the data bandwidth involved in sending a message is massively cheaper than SMS charges for the same message.

A single google search revealed a whole page allowing you to send and receive SMS messages from iPad or desktop if that's the problem.

So, basically, as far as I can see it's not the networks preventing this. It's the users. Stop sending SMS messages and urge all your friends to move to any one of a dozen non-SMS message formats and you're done.

You're confusing network layer standardization (IP) with the application layer (HTTP, etc.)

elucidate... I'm pretty sure I'm clear on the difference there...

We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity:

0) Acknowledge there is a problem.

1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end encryption for ALL major OSes (Mobile + Desktop).

2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it (without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising.

3)-5) Repeat for Voice.

6)-8) Repeat for Video.

Right now we're still at step 0) with TextSecure being the most promising at reaching 1). Each subsequent step becomes less and less likely to succeed, so I wouldn't bet any money that we have anything like that in the future. Maybe if MS released Skype as Open Source (which doesn't seem so unlikely anymore after yesterday's news).

"open standards" pretty much equals "no business model", unfortunately - at least for something end-user orientated like this.

I'm not sure about this - it could also be that the medium simply isn't mature enough yet. I mean look at the international phone network - they somehow managed to get everyone in the same boat - you don't need some special service just because you want to call up Australia. Yes, they don't all have the same standard, but at least they are interoperable.

Similarly, why do we need proprietary standard to charge money for a service? As a consumer I don't care about whether a protocol is open or closed, instead I care about a) what percentage of people here and abroad it can connect me to and b) the reliability of their servers. Making it proprietary is just detrimental to (a) in the long term while gaining the provider some mid term benefits by shutting out competition.

> Most promising at

Never heard..

My foreign language skills tend to increase between the second and third coffee, sorry about that..

The language was fine... Just saying I've never heard of the one you say is most promising regarding adoption numbers

Point 1) wasn't about adoption numbers but functionality in terms of clients. TextSecure are the only OSS ones with an easy to use client I know that have as one of their goals to create iOS / Desktop clients. That's why I wrote we're at stage 0) right now, with some hope at reaching 1).

It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.

GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle.

Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my roster. Google and XMPP is dead, in my world.

Facebook? Well, I don't care what protocol they use if it doesn't allow federation. That's just another silo and XMPP is just a random implementation detail. The next version of Facebook's chat might switch to something else -> Just like Hangout did.

My brother and I have avoided upgrading the Talk application on our mobiles and we can video call each other from it. I can call him from my Xoom too, which I also have upgraded to the latest Hangouts.

If I attempt to video call from a laptop to my brother (using the plugin you must install in Chrome etc.), he never gets notified and it states that he can't join the Hangout.

This makes the service useless.

Why is this broken? How do I fix it? Is there anyone here from Google that can help?

I remember using MSN in the olden days on a variety of platforms with joy and ease, yet as everyone states, all these new tiny platforms that compete makes it actually impossible to reliably send messages to anyone. I still use SMS for that.

Also, does anyone know if Hangouts on Android indicates if someone is online or offline yet?

I talk to friends who are still on Google's XMPP servers from Fastmail's XMPP server. It works. I think it works if their account was created when gTalk was still a thing. But yeah, I'm more worried about Google shutting off my friends every day.

If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage. However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite the bullet and use them.

The problem is when you get taxed to do so. WhatsApp posed a much smaller tax ($2) than the potential tax you could have to pay to the telcos (roaming charges + SMS fees). This was the killer feature.

Exactly. And, you can still fallback to text, email, or a phone call...

As long as your friends are not the kind of people who organise their lives on those services.

"Oh, you didn't know about the party? I told everyone on the whatsapp group chat (that you are not a part of)".

When these walled-garden communication channels become the de facto way of socialising then not being on them is a massive handicap. (As I know from my friends moaning at me for not having whatsapp)

So should you be blaming the software, or your social circle?

How about the web as a communication platform? Check out awesometalk.com for video, for example. No need to install anything, besides a compatible browser, of course :)

Isn't this what WebRTC will fix? http://www.webrtc.org/

No, not exactly. WebRTC has no concept of interoperability between services, only between clients. You need a signalling server to communicate the initial call between clients, and if you wish to connect clients across services, then those two services would need to connect to each other in some way, which is not detailed in the spec.

There are efforts to use SIP and XMPP for this, but that only solves the WebRTC-part. If you want SIP-clients to interconnect, you need expensive hardware/software to transcode the streams, and you loose the P2P-part. WebRTC is not a golden cow of interoperability between services.

No. It just makes it easier to build even more services that can't talk to each other. What we need are federated services, like email and XMPP.

Some one get this guy an email account.

Can I read this article? No, I'm on a smartphone :) (no mobile version of the site)

This is not true exactly because there is a "core communications standard that guarantees interoperability", which is what the article asks for.

I don't use apps. Does that make me a grandpa? I'm under 30. Too much coffee for this guy.

The last paragraph is cool, and I can visualize a day when you just want to contact someone async... or not in any medium and not have to worry about the network. The rant was pointless though.

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