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Comment by simoncion | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)".

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