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Comment by automathematics | Hacker News Reader

Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts

Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is:

1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her"

2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them).

This has been a nightmare for me over the last 2 years and I can't stand how something as simple and SOLVED as chat protocol has been nuked and replaced with proprietary crap that thinks it's impressive to announce a semantic MAJOR release update that touts "Group Messaging" as a major new innovation (I'm looking at you, Apple).

Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and be done with it.

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> 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users.

Shit, Hangouts itself is an unreliable message delivery system. [0]

At least once an month in both group chats and one-on-one chats I will get messages that seem out of context. Somewhere between many minutes and an hour later, the messages between the OOC one and the previous [1] message will silently appear. The "new" messages are inserted between the previous and OOC message, and bear timestamps that make it look as if they were never missing.

I've even had this happen while I had the conversation in question open in the damn client! It's super-fun to see ten or so "new" messages slide in between two already-delivered ones. :/

So, if you've ever wondering if you had a brain fart and overlooked an important message in Hangouts, you may very well have not!

[0] Yep, I'm using the latest software.

[1] Previous at the time I received the out of context message.

I used to have this problem and it was something really stupid, like the local clock's time being wrong.

I really wish it was that simple for me: my phone is synced with the cell network and all of my other computers get their time from NTP.

Hangouts/google voice have been really bad in this regard for me. Lots of sms drops a year or so ago. No message drops in a while but constant notification drops getting me in trouble.

I stopped using hangouts with Google voice because messages were only infrequently delivered.

This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.

I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS, i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one experiencing this Hangouts problem [0]. The lady friend thinks I'm nuts.

Speaking of SMS, when I lived in the American Southeast, I occasionally had SMS messages from friends be delivered months late.

Neither Hangouts nor SMS are the messaging systems of the future. :P If Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't gain traction, maybe we need a super-sexy frontend over top of email.

[0] Looks like we were concurrently writing up our experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267147

What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).

Your bank is using a bad SMS service provider. With a SS7 uplink (versus a cheap SMPP connection), it should arrive within seconds, with a delivery report for the sender, if desired.

Hmm.. we get it within a few minutes.

Its not XMPP that's the problem, its Google Hangouts. Google Talk didn't drop messages (and its the one using XMPP).

My wife and I have gone back to emailing each other (from our phones) because we have periodic issues with massively delayed text messages (e.g. ~7PM "ETA?", reply "30 minutes", delivery of that reply ~1:30AM). Some of that's likely due to flakiness of her (old, but has a keyboard!) phone, but regardless of that email moves right through.

Ahhhh that'll explain never receiving messages and my friends not getting them. Some bust scenarios I experience:

1. I will call my wife using Hangouts - she won't be notified on her phone.

2. I chat with someone via Google Talk on my old phone - if they're using Hangouts, they may or may not receive the message.

3. Someone will chat with me via Hangouts. My phone with Google Talk may or may not receive it; BUT! if I open the web browser version on a laptop, it'll receive it (and makes me look like an ignorant weirdo when I reply to messages that have been "there" for days...

Mobile hangouts to mobile hangouts mostly works (apart from the video call at intermittent times). Oddly, the Hangouts client will say that the person was not available for a video call (ie, they didn't pick up) but they didn't receive any alert or ANYTHING to state that there was a call coming in.

No offence to the team there, but it's a piece of junk. Video calling and voice calling and text all worked fine under Google Talk; under Hangouts, I might as well be putting messages in bottles and hoping they will reach the destination...

Even MSN Messenger was more reliable, and that was 15+ years ago; I am not sure how this is not a solved problem! (Not sure if they've fixed the lack of online/offline presence in Hangouts yet; if not, it is STUPID. "Are you there?" Who knows!)

Long before I hangouts I had lots of issues with Google talk. I started numbering my messages as in

1 Hey Joe

2 How are things in SG

3 Are you going to meet me at the airport?

4 Or shall I take a cab?

5 In any case I'll be into the city by 7pm so we can grab dinner

etc.

What we found was that Google talk was dropping messages. Lots of them.

With no way to complain and no way to prove it I just stopped using Google Talk. It was really disappointing to see it do so poorly though. Like most of the rest of you it seemed like chat was a solved issue.

Did you ever grab dinner?

What did you switch to using? My mum has an iPad, my wife has an iPad and also an Android phone, I have a Mac, my brothers have Android phones; do I just spam everyone on each network (Messages / Talk / Hangouts / Skype)? I tend to now SMS everyone - at least that's mostly universal (but my mum will never get any messages).

I would use Skype but it enjoys eating battery as a hobby on both mobile and desktop/laptop.

I had the same issue. Anywhere in 80-100% of the messages get delivered. Lost interest quickly...

I still wonder when https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications will go away.

What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore.

Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.

Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.

There are just too many different proprietary IM protocols, and they are often fast moving targets. You can't keep up with a team of Google engineers tweaking their protocol every day.

Have a look at WhatsApp, there was a bunch of efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, and they ended up non-working, abandoned or C&Ded [0]

[0] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI/issues/83

Sean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.

I've seen a radical effect on the usage Talk due to this.

Only my tech-savvy friends would use Google Talk previously and the others would use Facebook. Since the push from Google to use Hangout, nobody I know is using Hangout or Google Talk anymore and it looks like everyone switched to Facebook/Whatsapp on my contact list. I don't even open the chat anymore.

My rant, apart from all your valid points is that they don't support half of XMPP extensions, including offline messages. So if someone writes to you while offline, you only get an inbox notification in Gmail.

Why IRC isn't the foundation for all chat I still don't know. I assume a lot of the typical workflow (logging in, choosing a nick) can be automated for users who don't care to know what chat protocol they are using.

NetSplit? Intermittent network disconnect and suddenly ghosts? No delivery reports? No read tickets?

Because it fails to satisfy so many modern demands. It doesn't even understand user names that aren't a subset of ASCII. Most of the commands aren't really standardized. It doesn't support end-to-end encryption (which today even WhatsApp is using). It requires you to be always connected instead of using push notification systems which are way better for the battery of mobile devices.

Probably the only reason the protocol is still around is that it's popular among a certain group. IRC is so different from what you would want from a modern chat system that it doesn't make much sense to build upon it.

True enough, but rather than "doesn't support" end-to-end encryption, it doesn't standardize it. You can slap OTR on pretty much any messaging protocol. Client support is a problem though.

setup a ejabberd server on a beaglebone and put a web xmpp client on it. encrypt the shit out of everything, get your friends on to it.

i'm sure there's valid business reasons to kill xmpp, not just total information awareness pressures from above.

i suggested this because i believe xmpp to be superior to irc.

Step #4 (get your friends to use it) is really hard to do. I tried and failed with my friend group. If there's one non-technical user in the group (or one who is tremendously attached to their Hangouts chat history), you're probably doomed to failure.

i've had limited success, one factor that helped was me going cold turkey on the alternatives. also you define your own success, gaining a monopoly is rather a high standard!

This.

If you won't drop the other networks there's no need for them to join your server, your still on the networks they're already using. Only you can change that.

I wrote a reply to another message that expressed this sentiment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267342

We apparently have quite different friends. Removing myself from Hangouts means that I get information either in person, or through email, if at all.

I'm currently relying on the Signal rework of TextSecure to get most of us off of Hangouts: the big barrier to adoption has been easy-to-configure clients that work on Android, iOS, and desktop and sync message history amongst clients.

web client xmpp isn't going to be very good at storing message history, i'll grant you.

Yep. You'd need a server somewhere to store and replay that message history. There is an XMPP standard that specifies how to do that. Question is whether or not your client can speak that protocol.

curiousity piqued, what's the XEP number for the protocol?

XEP-0313 I think: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

I was actually thinking about XEP-0136: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html . I was completely unaware of XEP-0313, thanks for the info!

XEP-136 is a good example why it's a bad idea to squeeze everything into a single specification (or XEP in this case): The reason it was not implemented by most XMPP stacks was, because it's so much you have to implement. XEP-313 focuses on what is important to achieve WhatsApp like persistent chats in XMPP. Functionality which is lacking in XEP-313 can be specified later on in a different XEP. After all that's why it is called the "Extensible Message and Presence Protocol (XMPP)".

I have the same experience with not being signed into chat networks, or not having Facebook / WhatsApp / Twitter etc. etc. accounts. People either don't tell me anything, or they email.

The craziest thing I get asked is "Do you have WhatsApp? I can send you pictures, and it's FREE!". Oddly the thought of sending an email with a picture attached (how easy is it on a phone these days??) doesn't pop into their mind as being "free" either!!! Insane! Email is far superior, as I can archive it unlike IM history.

> Email is far superior...

nod nod

I mention in another thread that if Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't take off, perhaps what we need is a super-sexy frontend on top of SMTP and IMAP.

> ...Do you have WhatsApp?...

The thing that really gets me going is the folks who will only send pictures with MMS.

I would like to believe the same. The prosody folks are awesome btw (as an alternative to ejabberd).

But there are still open issues. One big one, compared to all the FB/Google/etc. offerings is the ability to have a usable chat log. Current xmpp implementations/standards are more or less useless if you happen to use more than one device and want to look something up/want to see what you wrote to your brother yesterday, on your desktop, while looking at your phone.

Mandatory extensions in my world: - Stream Management (easy) - Carbon Copies (easy) - MAM/Message Archive (described above, hard, haven't found a way yet)

Mam is exactly what I am waiting for too.

It should be in prosody 0.10 [1] (not stable yet) but I did not yet have a change to test it.

(And XEP-0313 is still quite new and experimental)

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_mam

The problem right now is persistent connections on iOS. You need to use push messages instead, which requires a plugin on the jabber server and a matching client.

Not something you can expect all your friends to set up.

i thought push notifications worked with IM+ on iOS? i am not very familiar with either though, so i'm probably wrong.

There is a number of IM clients for iOS, that store your credential "in the cloud" (use their own infrastructure to terminate the XMPP connection and route push notifications to their clients). This is not ideal for your privacy, to put it into friendly words.

interesting! i think iMessage works like that. not sure that IM+ does, but it might well.

You could also have clients and servers implement http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html .

ejabberd doesn't support 0357 [0]. Presumably because their 'pro' version has mobile support.

MongooseIM doesn't support it either, although there is talk of it being implemented [1]

To be fair though, it was only accepted on the 18th March 2015.

[0] - https://www.ejabberd.im/protocols [1] - https://github.com/esl/MongooseIM/issues/405

Hehe, over a week of time and it's still not there!

FWIW, somebody is working on an ejabberd module [1], and there's some discussion [2] on the <standards@xmpp.org> mailing list.

(And ejabberd's community edition supports the XEPs that are relevant to mobile clients too, BTW.)

[1] - https://github.com/royneary/mod_push [2] - http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2015-March/thread...

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