Message from Facebook: this could be war | Hacker News Reader

Message from Facebook: this could be war

espresso.economist.com

39 pointsrbanffy73 comments

Ugh.

At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws.

Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will?

Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late?

And email is under constant attack. Especially corporate/business email, but personal accounts are now targets as well. Basically anyone with a bank/ebay/paypal account is a target if they have an email address.

Spam, malware and phishing are huge problems with email. I doubt it will exist forever in its current form. I expect more and more restrictions (on sending and receiving) and more and more walled gardens as corporations and people attempt to better defend themselves.

This is indeed why people retreat to the safety of "platforms". It's Bruce Schneier's "feudalism" argument: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...

IMO the theoretically best way out of this is the user-owned cooperative, but there's very little traction for that.

Meh, I don't trust a large "user-owned cooperative" much more than I trust Google. Then incentives of the owners may be more aligned, but the incentives of the people who actually run it aren't. For an example, see the collapse of the Spanish banking system, much of which was composed of mutual banks.

I'd trust a small cooperative, but then you still have the problem of federating between those, which brings you back to square one.

XMPP?

>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late?

This is why I simply love IRC.

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates.

I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in the pudding.

IRC is great, for geeks.

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies.

IRC is a very transparent protocol, there are A LOT of chat applications that you see and use every day that are actually implemented using an underlying IRC protocol or variation of it and provide an IRC interface (an example would be Twitch chat).

Furthermore, I've seen IRC being used in a lot of companies internally by most engineers and not.

I would definitely say that IRC has NOT failed, let alone colossally.

EDIT: To reply to everybody and make it easier, I fully understand that IRC isn't universally used (that is the point of the original post) and that is in a steep decline, I'm just saying that claiming it 'failed' (both as front and back end technology) is simply not true. It's old and not as used anymore, that's it. It's like saying the Nokia 3310 phone has failed colossally because not many people use it anymore.

Everyone has an email address. I know only three or four people who have even used IRC since 2000, typically for developers on open source product chat rooms like Drupal.

Whatever the pros and cons of the technology, or the whys and wherefores of the reason for this lack of widespread use, it clearly has not been adopted by the mainstream. If the goal of a protocol is to be used widely, then clearly IRC has failed.

I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.

Incorrect. It is easy to get that via self-hosted services like znc.in or third-party services like: https://www.irccloud.com/

For the sake of argument I'm pretty sure stingraycharles meant built in, not another extra thing added on before you can use it

Ok, so there's a difference between failing as an underlying technology, and failing as an actual thing people use.

Herein lies the difference between e-mail and IRC - e-mail is fundamentally the same as an underlying technology (we still use IMAP!), but as an end-user product has changed a huge amount over the last twenty years. Things like webmail have progressed a huge amount, and systems like Outlook/Exchange have been built that allow it to be managed in a business centric manner.

With modern e-mail, you sign up for an e-mail, and that's it. You can now go to a website and e-mail people.

With IRC as a product, (aside from the ugly webchats that still expose huge streams of text and NickServ and other things), the end-user experience is still fundamentally the same.

Instant messaging was useful to non-tech users since the days before web 2.0. Don't you remember AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger?

ICQ forever!

While IRC is certainly in use at companies and by the public, it's in a pretty steep decline, especially in the last decade and a half. The only people who avidly use it in their free time anymore tend to be tinkerers and tech types. (As a side effect of this, the only large network that hasn't been shrinking significantly is Freenode.) From the public point of view, IRC is something for CSI-type movies to name drop when they want to evoke hacker culture, which is not by itself a bad thing, but it's a strong indicator of a perception problem.

As someone who has spent a non-trivial amount of time in IRC development and as an operator on small and medium sized networks, I've noticed that IRC (especially when services are involved) is pretty counter-intuitive for many users, even otherwise brilliant ones. Modes are obtuse and vary wildly from server to server, the idea of a separate nickname and channel registrations seems unnecessarily complex, channels just disappear when everybody leaves them, and so on. On top of this, the IRC architecture is needlessly limited for the most common IRC network use cases these days. In the past where networks were a federation of autonomous servers, it made sense, but these days a network's servers are partly or entirely controlled by a single entity, and things like netsplits are an unnecessary interruption in user service.

There is a working group to define the next generation of the IRC standard, but the additions tend to be patches for small nigglings in the protocol (such as needing to consistently poll for user away statuses and account names) than aggressive overhauls to the whole architecture, which is okay; there's only so much you can do with an effort like that while still seeing progress, and these are things IRC has needed for a long time anyway.

In my opinion what is needed if IRC is to regain its popularity is an innovative new server implementation that challenges the very workings of IRC from the ground up, maintaining only enough of the protocol to interact with existing clients. If users are to feel comfortable with IRC, they need a server software suite that conforms to their expectations of how a chat service should behave, and no solution currently provides that. The problem is, there is an enormous engineering cost associated with this, and the IRC development community is having a hard enough time as it is finding people who are willing to do more than just basic maintenance tasks.

I think the one big distinction between IRC and email which made the latter gain massive popularity is that theoretically (i.e. spam-prevention and other blocking notwithstanding), any email you send from one address' provider/domain can reach any other email address. This means people can publish an email address and anyone else is able to easily contact them. The server that gets mailed is even specified in the DNS system - MX records. With IRC, you basically have to be on the same network to chat, and there's no way to publish an "IRC server address" in the DNS.

I have a feeling that if DNS had this capability, and "IRC addresses" became standardised in the same way as emails (e.g. nick!irc.example.com), allowing anyone to use it with the same universality as email, the story might be very different today.

IRC is great, and I'm sure it could be great for non-geeks too! When we started working on Matrix (matrix.org) we based a lot of the messaging/chat side of things on the features we like (and the ones we miss!) from IRC, and now we have a bridge to our IRC channels which means you can chat to Matrix-users from irssi or whatever - or you can use the webbrowser or android/ios matrix client and still keep an eye on IRC.

Auto-backfill is really nice. And being able to send rich content is something we kind of take for granted these days.

(disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org)

IRC? I think that would be the closest analogue to email. Open standard, many implementations.

XMPP (Jabber) is probably a more direct analogy. But the idea is similar. Unfortunately most of the big providers (Google, Facebook, etc) are disabling XMPP federation for their chat services, even if they still use the protocol internally.

Because open-source chat platforms lack features that make apps like WhatsApp good for regular users.

How long does it take you to set up a Jabber client? Can you add a person to Jabber using just their phone number?

It depends on the client. TextSecure is an open-source XMPP/Jabber client for Android which does end-to-end encryption (OTR?), and adds contacts based on your address book automatically.

It also supports adding a new contact by phone number, and replaces the stock text messaging application, automatically upgrading text messages to OTR XMPP sessions if the other party is on the same network.

It doesn't do federation though, as far as I know.

No iOS version.

Yes there is, it's called Signal[1], by the same developers. It started out as two separate products, but you can use them to chat between iOS and Android.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id8...

Because companies are set up to cater for a mainstream user base. They have succeeded in making it exceptionally easy to use their apps with little if at all precursory knowledge or effort.

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time).

I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends on a lot more than the technology.

What is wrong with jabber group chat?

You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

> What is wrong with jabber group chat?

The presumably protocol-level problems are that you can't "upgrade" a two-person conversation to a groupchat, and that a groupchat is an entity in its own right belonging to a particular server, which is something the user really shouldn't have to care about (and also causes reliability issues). And that there's no history.

Beyond that the user experience in every client I've used is terrible: open a dialogue to list available groupchats, manually join one, accept the notification, manually rejoin if you're disconnected. And then you tend to get notifications on every message, rather than just on messages that mention you; purely a client problem, but fundamentally if there are no good clients then it leads me to suspect there's a deeper problem.

Just compare with the groupchat experience in Slack or Skype or heck, AIM.

> You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

Send messages to all connected clients for the account, like virtually every other protocol does. And sync history between them. I can accept that that's hard without a centralized server, but it's vital.

My instance of Ejabber will send to all connected clients in the case where the priorities are identical.

Really? Cool. That's explicitly contrary to the XMPP spec (unless it's changed since I last looked), but good on them for doing the pragmatic thing.

Arguably people are still trying to "fix" jabber. For example XEP-0280: Message Carbons should help with multiple clients and XEP-0313: Message Archive Management (trunk Prosody, released Gajim, patches for Pidgin) finally bring an archive of messages synchronized between clients. Other extensions like XEP-0138, XEP-0198 or XEP-0237 would help mobile clients (e.g. Conversations for Android).

My only gripe is what took so bloody long. Google Talk debuted 10 years ago and IIRC had an online unified message archive (in gmail) for as long as I remember (2007?). It took 8 years to replicate that feature? "Good enough" ethics at work indeed.

Thanks for the link to matrix.org. I hadn't heard of it, and I wish them success. I don't think XMPP is awful, and I think the reasons for its failure have been political/social/cultural rather than technical, but if Matrix can get more traction, then more power to them.

Please come ask any questions on https://matrix.org/beta/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org -- or #matrix on freenode which is bridged to the same matrix "room"!

(disclaimer: I work on Matrix)

One more thing to dislike about XMPP/Jabber is that it's XML based. Writing products on top of it is unnecessarily verbose and complicated (also due to the bad choices you mentioned). A modern messaging protocol should use JSON.

Or something even simpler, like the line-based structure of IRC and MSNP; but you're right, it doesn't need to be XML to be extensible.

Reclassify mesasging provider as title II telecoms and force interoperability. Problem solved :) All of our technology software giants could use some Standard Oil/Bell labbing anyway.

Damn you're right. All we have to do is standardize an open source chat protocol. It's so simple! Why haven't we done this before? Clearly because you weren't around to point out it should be done. And not because it takes an incredible amount of influence and work to get a bunch of nerds to agree to something as simple as the name of a color, much less how a chat protocol should work. And not because it's much easier for a company that has a platform to do it since they don't have to appease every person on the standard body's whim. Nope. It was cause we didn't realize we needed one.

But hey, thank god you're here to be super helpful and point out that we don't have a good chat protocol, but we should darn it. So someone (not you obviously - you have things to do I'm sure) go get it done and report back after you've made a good open source chat protocol.

Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will?

For the same reason as there is a war for your money by big companies. This is how capitalism works. Except with data, it's worse: because people will use free services in preference to paid services, and because network effects are so strong (you can't be the only person you know using your chat service), services have to be "free" and extract value in other, exploitative ways.

Someone has to do the organisation and make it work. IRC makes the users do more of that work. This is true of open systems in general. Proprietary systems end up more convenient but with underhanded ways of paying for it: selling your data, intrusive advertising, etc.

    Facebook is expected to say that it will turn its
    app - called Messenger - which has 500m users, into
    a "platform". That means others will be able to
    develop software for it (for gaming, hotel bookings,
    tickets and so on).

Doesn't FaceBook have form in encouraging people to use its interfaces and facilities, and then either cutting them off or starting to charge unexpectedly? I wonder what guarantees they will give that they will provide continuity of service.

Certainly I'd be incorporating an exit strategy, and my game plan would be to leverage off FB to start with, to grow as fast as possible, develop my own community and eco-system, and then be able to shed FB and replace it with something else.

I wouldn't trust them.

But that's just me. I'm interested to see what the HN community thinks.

I think at this point it's irresponsible to do anything other than what you're describing. There's no reason to expect FB to change their strategy.

I'm not completely sure if there are clear-cut examples of bait-and-switch. Possibly 'pages' where initially the people who liked them would see all posts until it gradually decreased to 10-15% unless you paid. But that is somewhat justifiable by fb's attempt to keep the news feed relevant.

But it is an obvious threat for the 'open web'. Look at what happened to email. My inbox is a great archive for my social life pre-2010, but since then it's just (some) business and lots of transactional mails. With email people had a choice of clients. With messenger you're stuck with whatever Facebook offers. Same with RSS vs. Twitter.

There's no immediate and direct harm, which is why it'll continue. It's comparable to the privatisation of public spaces. People used to meet on main street, now they go to the mall. The latter is more convenient, possibly cheaper and has the (5) starbucks you expect. There is no harm, unless you live on the sidelines of society: as a hobo, or, even worse, protester.

If only there were a business model for something like diaspora...

There is no such guarantee. Right now, the publishing industry is in its own conundrum on how to deal with Facebook. FB is reportedly in talks with content providers, including the New York Times, to publish content directly on FB's platform...the ostensible reason being that it provides a better user experience. Publishers would get more eyeballs and presumably some cut of the ad revenue, and publishers who don't go for this, well, they may find their external content more and more deprioritized. As the Atlantic pointed out [1], back in 2011, Facebook announced "social reader" apps and news orgs jumped on...and when FB decided less than a year later to drop the effort, well, all those efforts were wasted.

FB is in a much stronger position now, and conversely, publishers have only gotten weaker. Ideally, publishers would take the tack that you've described...FB will undoubtedly provide some kind of API that would make it easy for news orgs to export their CMS data as easily as they do for their print and web editions...if publishers don't like how things are going, then they just pull out, and their API points to another platform.

The problem is that publishers are very weak financially and have shown very little ability to innovate. And consumers have shown mostly apathy about the way their daily attention is diverted to social networking and linkbait...so news publishers have serious existential issues on top of their financial ones.

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/facebo...

You don't have to trust them. But using their platform, you can reach such a gigantic amount of users, it's better to use it anyway. Even if they screw you afterwards.

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol (http://xmpp.org/). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations (http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

Innovation = invention * commercialization

Kudos for differentiating between those 3! ;)

I personally don't believe that invention and commercialization as suggested by this equitation (maybe not intentionally) are equally important, beneficial, meaningful.

I'd say: Innovation is the commercialization of an invention; it's just the corporate propaganda and internal incentive structure for people within which projects these process in such a way into the world as to make it believe something has been invented by a corporation for the benefit of the "audience". Which is very far away from the truth, i think.

I was going to say that Facebook Messenger does work with XMPP but double checking just now, it seems that was deprecated a year ago and will disappear at the end of next month. Huh.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

Also, it never supported federation. Which is the email equivalent of gmail users only being able to email other gmail users.

it's a real shame - both facebook and google tried to use XMPP but have since removed support.

I think Google still work with XMPP but not 100%.

https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications

https://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for-goog...

In particular you mean XMPP with federation between servers. In general capitalism is a force against interoperability.

SMTP is an open standard. No one is making any money on email clients. The good ones have become such a commodity that they are open source. When people go looking for email hosting they get to choose between more or less identical services. SMTP is simply a terrible market. When everyone starts encrypting their emails then Gmail will cease to exist.

XMPP is literally worse than AIM (AIM is actually quite good these days, shame nobody uses it). Its groupchat support is simply awful, and if you log in from multiple devices (which was common enough years ago and is ubiquitous now that people have mobile phones) then messages will go to one at random and you will never have consistent chat history.

These shouldn't be hard problems given that just about every other chat system manages to get them right (though the hair-shirt of decentralization may make them harder), but they've been obvious problems with XMPP for about a decade now.

I wouldn't call decentralization a hair-shirt. I mean, I take your point; it makes certain things more difficult to implement. But it's a tradeoff, not a pointless sacrifice. There are huge advantages. The most obvious one to me is "keep your personal identifier when you change providers". Just like email.

In the UK, there have been quite a few TV ads from Facebook recently.

Yesterday, after watching another one, my girlfriend commented: "Even Facebook is making ads now - this tells us a lot about how well things are going for them."

Heh, good point. Google advertises on Google but I have hardly seen a Google ad outside of a page that displays Google ads. Disclaimer: I don't watch TV.

Google did heavy advertising over here in the UK for Chrome. Billboards everywhere.

Saw adverts for Chrome browser on the Tube a few years back

I recently started watching live TV through a digital antenna and SlingTV, and I've actually seen a handful of ads for Google. I've only seen one or two search ads, but a bunch for Android thought their new "Be different, not the same" campaign. Still, many more than I've seen for Facebook.

Then you missed the massive TV campaign Google did last year telling you how they were going to track your child's life from conception to death. Uber-creepy.

I've seen loads of Google ads - on TV, in the press, and especially outdoor advertising. It's typically conceptual stuff, about security, privacy, etc.

In addition, I get a lot of direct mail with vouchers for using AdWords.

There are TV ads in the UK for "Android", focusing on the diversity of devices you can get (as opposed to the Apple monoculture)

I think advertising makes more sense for Google - they have a number of products, and are always releasing new ones, so advertising is as much branding as it is informing.

For Facebook, however, it's just branding - everybody knows what Facebook does (and the ads are just that - "keep friends").

That was also my initial reaction: "Wow they must be getting desperate if they're resorting to TV advertising."

Is this "espresso" format the future for the economist? There should be a link to the full article at least, I read this rag purely for the analysis and this format is a bit short on that.

here it is in full: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21646802...

Espresso is breaking snippets that come out every day. I see it is as stuff that hasn't been written up for the weekly yet.

The Economiszt wants you to subscribe to ead the the full article, which is here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/messagi...

This is the kind of market where UI/UX is the single most important thing in the app. I personally began using MSN messenger 10 years ago , and moved to skype because I felt skype was easier to use, had a better UI . It was simply beautiful compared to MSN messenger. On the other hand, the skype client on my android is just shitty as hell, it might have changed since but I understand why skype doesn't dominate the mobile space.

I tried a lot of "raw" XMPP clients, most of them felt like the developer was in charge of the UI/UX. It felt like shit.

If an open standard wants to win, it has to have a very good client,with a perfect UX/UI.

I understand it's a bit difficult for designers that aren't developers to contribute to opensource code projects. I'm thinking very hard about how such a tool could be set up,and how can the design workflow and the coding workflow could be joined seamlessly. I'll come up with something eventually.

This is different from the "browser wars", because the thing that people are trying to access through their choice of messenger app does not look, feel, and function differently depending on which one they choose. The experience doesn't break because one chat application decides to implement one feature and others don't because they aren't supposed to work together.

It's similar, however, in that consumers have a lot of choice, with no one chat application really being that much better than any other in terms of features or experience, just that if we could just get everyone on one and for that one application to continue to improve, everything would be great, in theory.

This isn't going to stop any time soon.

As developers we value open apis and interop, but I'm not sure end-users care that much. They just want to connect with their friends and family, and if they need to use a different apps to stay connected, so be it.

In a way, I think the device and notification systems are enough for most people. If I have 5 different message apps, they are all on my phone and they all notify me when something comes in, so I'm able to stay connected.

First they separated messaging from the Facebook app where you can have games and apps and stuff and now they are integrating all that back. Why? Personally I absolutely prefer a slim messaging app not bloated with more or less unrelated stuff.

My thoughts exactly. Seems like facebook bought Whatsup to bring it to the ground.

The messaging wars never really ended. It simply moves to new formats as technology evolves. Through it all, though, IRC carries on. May it always be so.

I'm sick to my back teeth of 'platforms'.

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