Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned.
Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?
Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?
I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work!
Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.
For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.
But the benefit of XMPP is that a new extension can be proposed that does this if enough people want such a feature. Personally I would argue that a better approach would be to make Public MUC logs accessible and searchable via a web interface and to have the client log chats going forward from when they join (with offline messaging from the server so you don't have to be online the whole time).
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25982426/persistent-xmpp-...
There are implementations for servers, e.g https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_mam_muc, but I have yet to see a client reliably supporting this.
When a client logs in, it is true that a server doesn't have to send messages back, but that's the goal of XEP-0313.
I really like XMPP, and the extensibility it has is brilliant, but at the same time leads to a crazy level of fragmentation for the instant messaging use case. You're basically guaranteed that you can chat to others and maintain a buddy list, but anything much beyond that is a toss up, depending on the server used, how it's configured, and what client each user has.
The only thing that's missing, is end-to-end encryption.
Across all my devices - Web, Linux, Android and FirefoxOS. No advertising.
Telegram - http://telegram.org
I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).
I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service, but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.
That's a very nice sentiment, but it's not a sentiment that fills me with confidence that I can rely on the continued existence of the free thing they're giving me.
This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol.
Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location.
The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS).
I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone.
I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them.
Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
Some of us do care.
Where is the source code?
Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
But it's better than nothing.
So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client.
But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.
The constant ping-pongs really dissuade me from using IRC on my mobile as it kills my battery life. Being able to set some kind of "mobile" mode and receive push notifications if I get a hilight would be ideal.
SMTP survived despite changing fads. If we're ever going to standardize IM (or anything), we have to accept that protocols may use older technology. Someday JSON will be old too. Let's not make these mistakes again.
The problem with XMPP isn't that it was based on XML. No, what made it annoying was that the dudes who made it decided that instead of basing it on exchanging individual messages, i.e. XML documents like everyone else does, everything must instead be put inside a so-called XML stream.
IIRC it basically meant that the exchange started with a start tag that wasn't terminated until the connection was closed. Since nothing at the time was designed to work with unfinished XML documents (remember the end tag doesn't come until you're done), all the convenient standard XML tools/libraries wouldn't work.
So I don't think XMPP is a stellar piece of work. But it's of course much better than some proprietary crap, and it's sad to see it lose support, although I imagine to Google and Facebook who both probably couldn't care less about interoperability, having an open XMPP interface is probably more of a liability (spammers, enables people to skip their ads) than something they get much perceived value out of.
Of course, lack of adoption by the big providers was almost certainly political rather than technical.
Messaging is one of those areas that is actually pretty simple that corporations that want to own channels have munged up pretty bad into a complex mess. Companies internally even have a couple or few.
Side note: AOL/Timewarner actually owns the IM patent from ICQ (http://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/12/19/internet.aol....)
The value/burden of XML has always been a topic of debate for XMPP. In retrospect, I think it contributed to its lack of appeal, though the extensibility and readbility (ehm, arguably) it provided were unique back then.
I've long wondered about which alternative base protocols could be used in place. JSON is OK, but may be as much a fad as XML. I've wondered if ASN.1 could be used, but ProtoBufs sound like they're a better fit [2] in that they're simpler, more space-efficient, and backwards-and-forwards compatible (and thus extensible, XMPP's main feature) In fact, it's what Google already uses themselves.
[1] http://psi-im.org/ [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/protobuf/eNAZlnPKVW4
SMTP has no "base protocol" in this sense. HTTP, nothing (unless you count RFC 822).
It's hard to think there protocols would have had the same life time if they were based on XML, JSON, or protobufs. (Yeah, HTTP over XML, that should be enough to give you nightmares. But welcome to DAV and XMPP.)
* XML has a formal, class-based description language (XML Schema) with strong typing, polymorphism, and - best of all - self-descriptiveness.
* Languages like Java have a seamless, bidirectional mapping to XML Schema.
* XML has a rediculously powerful and elegant transformation language (XSLT) which makes scraping, selective data extraction and processing trivial.
The problem with XML is that people who require instant satisfaction are not willing to invest the time to understand it, and the mature tooling ecosystem around it.
The XML ecosystem solves problems, and contains solutions to problems, that the JSON / JavaScript ecosystem can only dream of, and is hell-bent on partially re-inventing.
If you need strong-typing and self-descriptiveness, you're out of luck with JSON. Binding JSON to a strong-typed language like Java or Haskell is a total ball-drag compared to XML + Schema.
Couldn't the parsing be a pluggable component? Just set a standard on how data is structured and let third-parties figure out how data is parsed.
Are you saying mom and dad aren't using XMPP because the message is sent using XML based stanzas? Facebook is ditching XMPP because of the X?
It doesn't matter?
Saving battery on mobile devices for one.
Are you saying that serializing something to JSON (or whatever you fancy here) vs. to XML .. saves battery?
I mean, XMPP is certainly not the battery friendliest tech right now (elsewhere people discuss push extensions for example), but .. that's not related to the use of XML.
Yes, that may sound futile, but in the end the developers are the people who build everything. It is my strong belief that HTTP, IRC, SMTP and bittorrent (among others) have thrived because of their utter simplicity, to the point we're embarassed today because we've ended up with so much under-specified crap on top of them. Still, they deliver. As always "worse is better".
There's an advanced representation, which looks like this: (message (header (sender "Billy Joe Bob") (sent "2015-03-26T12:02:00Z")) (body "Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!")). It's possible to encode any byte string using Base64 or hex. It's also possible to encode types with data: (message (header (sender "Billy Joe Bob") (sent "2015-03-26T12:02:00Z")) (body [text/html]"<p>Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!</p>"))
While there are multiple advanced encodings for the same data (e.g. foo or "foo" or |Zm9v| or #666f6f#), there is a _single_ canonical encoding for any datum: the messages above would be (7:message(6:header(6:sender13:Billy Joe Bob)(4:sent20:2015-03-26T12:02:00Z))(4:body35:Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!)) and (7:message(6:header(6:sender13:Billy Joe Bob)(4:sent20:2015-03-26T12:02:00Z))(4:body[9:text/html]42:<p>Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!</p>)).
A huge advantage of this canonical encoding is that it's amenable to cryptographic hashing and signing; a weakness of JSON is that one has to layer requirements atop JSON itself (e.g. alphabetising object properties) in order for two parties to be able to hash the same datum and get the same value.
Another advantage of canonical S-expressions is that it's straightforward to define a mapping between them and HTML: "<p class='foo'>This is a <em>nifty</em> paragraph.<br /></p>" could be represented as ((p (class foo)) "This is a " (em nifty) paragraph. (br)). There are other possible mappings between S-expressions and HTML, of course, but I like that one. Another might be (p (/ (class foo)) "This is a " (em nifty) paragraph. (br)).
This reminds me a lot of bencode, with the advantage for bencode that it doesn't need any fiddling for non-printable characters: no more base64, no more hex.
I'd say that bencode's advantage is a built-in standard for integer encoding (with canonical S-expressions one must decide between ASCII decimals or little/big-endian bit strings), and a clearer standard for a dictionary/map/hash (a canonical S-expression would probably use an alist-like structure like (map (foo bar) (baz quux)), but one could also go with (map foo bar baz quux), (map (foo bar baz quux)) or some other encoding.
We'll always have SMS.
> If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.
I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270
Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.
I'm not an Apple hater, I use Apple products, but this is a huge fuckup and the OTT fragmentation is a real issue vis-a-vis SMS.
And SMS is not IM so your premise from the start is a nonsequitor. It's telephony, it's wildly and widely overpriced and non-open.
Even sadder are the news articles (like ones you find in the technology section on the BBC website) where they refer to instant messaging as wonderful and then "if you're a bit old fashioned" and still use email...... At least emails can be easily retrieved and archived.
Perhaps people don't care about the transport medium (phone network or Internet) but it is an important distinction. It's even more important for Google users because Hangouts is very flaky for me, unlike SMS.
> We'll always have SMS.