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Google Talk Claims Openness, Lacks S2S Support
rm writes "This LiveJournal entry by Nugget quite well sums up the disappointment in Google Talk among many Jabber users, caused by the service's complete lack of XMPP server-to-server communication support: '...Google has uncharacteristically missed the real strength of the Jabber design. Despite all their self-congratulation about open communications they've only embraced the smaller, less important aspect of the Jabber openness.'"
I'm sure they have something big planned. I doubt they would be using Jabber without planning on using S2S in the future.. The potential for this is HUGE.. Use Google talk and watch Google adds when talking to anybody on any protocol. Why wouldn't they? Remember folks, this is beta software that is only a week old.
I must be honest I am incredibly disappointed with Google talk (as of right now). I'm currently in the process of setting up my own jabber server and I am fairly new to jabber but I really do think that Google talk has a lot more potential..
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
Until I RTFA I didn't realise that inter-server communication was the really useful thing about Jabber. It looks like Google didn't either.
No way I'm going to pass plaintext through Google to be mined and added to my electronic dossier. So unless it has encryption support with verifiably no back door, it's a non-starter for me.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
You can't really make any money in a decentralized system, which proves Google is still looking to captivate us because they have always been quite central.
"Every strategic move should build a positional advantage or remove a disadvantage."
Why is Google offering a Google talk system? It currently serves no ads, and being client agnostic, will likely be a long time before it does serve ads consistently. How does this service, which costs money, serve Google as a company? It is not bringing in any money. All it does is counter the chat offerings from web portal competitors like MSN and Yahoo (both of which offer chat services). Google has implied that they will facilitate interoperability with other chat services and even offer e-mail as a parallel example. So maybe talking to other jabber servers is disabled temporarily in the beta, or maybe they plan to keep it disabled as an anti-spam measure. I foresee this following the same route as e-mail though. In the long term maintaining a whitelist of servers will be too hard, so Google will move to a blacklist and spam filtering solution. By interoperating they gain access to users on other systems, and make their service more attractive, thus gaining more direct users. They'd be pretty dumb not top make it interoperate with everyone in the long-term.
Hmm... how many of those are features of the protocol, as opposed to features of one or more of the main server implementations?
I can easily understand why they might want to omit offline messages, for example. In addition to the matter of storage (which they're probably not that bothered about) there's the issue that they must then store and forward messages. That may be legally different to a direct "switching" rely or direct user<->user comms.
The gateways are probably a legal thing, and again probably a feature of specific server implementations.
As for file transfers and group chat, I don't get that. I can only imagine that to be client limitations - or do they not work even with 3rd party clients?
Last I heard the official Jabber servers were pretty scalable but I'd bet a LOT that they were never designed to be scalable to Google sizes. Google writing their own distributed swarm of servers sounds more likely all the time to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if ejabberd is. I've recently started using Erlang on a project that needs to run on large clusters, and I'm amazed at how difficult it is to write code that doesn't scale well in it.
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Google is a company, people, it runs off money, not fanaticism. They don't have to do all the other things that the open source geeks do, that's not important, they use the piece of the code that's useful for them.
Yes, but I'm entitled not to use it like I have not used AOL's, MSN's or other proprietary IMs. If google chooses to follow the same model of message incompatibility and closed directories that AOL has then they should not shun the comparison.
That is, after all, the point of open source, is it not?
Not when talking about network and messaging protocols, the point is interoperability and ability to communicate with others, not setting up an island of users that can only communicate with themselves. Remember when AOL users could only email eachother? AOL resisted for years making their email able to communicate with people on other networks, the same has held true for IM except they didn't have serious competition from a simple open architecture alternative. It is the same dumb (for users) model done over and over.
Thanks, but no thanks, if google is not supporting an interoperable IM framework then i'll just continue to use gmail as my IM substitute until something better comes along. If interoperability and distributedness is on google talk's immediate roadmap then they need to say so and i'll hang around to see how it goes.
In general IM via Jabber is a permissions based system. You can grant very fine grain permissions using the standards set forth in XMPP. It's pretty easy to discard messages from anyone not on your jabber roster, and this can be done taken care of server side to cut down on the traffic. With an IM application, you are in the unique position that making this the default behavior will not cause problems for people.
Their 'federation' concept is completely bogus too. I really don't expect them to let my small 22 person jabber server 'federate' with them, and why should I jump through hoops to support Google talk users?
What's worse about it is that although jabber supports transports, I really doubt that anyone is going to bother to write a jabber-to-jabber transport to support Google Talk -- because anyone who would be capable of authoring such a transport is likely to be incredibly peeved about the lack of proper s2s support.
> You can't really make any money in a decentralized system,
> which proves Google is still looking to captivate us because
> they have always been quite central.
Ah, but you can provide a for-profit service through a decentralised network.
Imagine this: Google runs their IM network on the open XMPP/Jabber standard, and builds SIP based VoIP into their client (they say on their dev page that SIP is coming). Both are open standards and as such will be integrated into many clients and Jabber server implementations.
Jabber supports gateways onto other IM networks, but that isn't the full extent of gateways. Google build a VoIP -> PSTN gateway (say voip.talk.google.com) that allows all these new clients with integrated SIP VoIP to dial out to the old PSTN network for a cost.
What a lot of people don't realise about Jabber is that you aren't limited to using the gateways on your own Jabber server, so if Google then throws open S2S connections on their Jabber server user@jabber.org can access the Google VoIP->PSTN gateway and dial his parents (provided he has signed up with Google VoIP and has enough credit in his account) phone.
Google has been buying up a lot of Dark Fibre lately and could seriously undercut their rivals. No more need for Skype or other such providers, and normal Jabber users can voice chat without going via Google due to the nice open VoIP standards implemented in all Jabber clients.
- Google Search blew everything away with far better ranking algorithm than anything else, and wasn't a bloated ad-ridden portal
- GMail blew everything away with 1GB of storage and a decent AJAX interface
- Google Maps blew everything away with heavy reliance on AJAX
- other things weren't quite blow-everything away, but were still good:
- Google DMOZ combined DMOZ with Google's excellent pagerank
- Google Groups kept the usenet archive from disapearing
- Google Images may not be wonderful, but google's core competency is searching, so it has a shot at improving competition among image search engines
- Google News was new and different
- the Blogger acquisition allowed Blogger to improve some
- etc etc
Compared to all that, what benefit does Google Talk provide to customers? No, you can't hide behind "they MIGHT improve it"... Why does Google belong in this market? Is there something they're going to make available that makes it a stand-out? Do Google's existing skills make it likely that they can improve the IM market for consumers?Or is Google entering that market, simply because they're like Microsoft now, and want to enter every market they possibly can, just because?
Well, I'll be the 50th person to comment that it is a bit too soon (less than a week isn't it?) to criticize them for not having S2S support when they plainly state that that is one of their primary goals. DUH. Clearly they are not finished yet.
As to the article, which was far too long for the amount of actual information it contained, there were no revelations in it other than that which would be dictated by common sense. That common sense was cloak in a shroud of innuendo, inside sources, and conspiracy.
If in fact AOL, MSN and Yahoo cooperate with one another in some way to fend off the now "evil" Google, all users will be better off than before. They key prediction made by the article and the one on which the veracity of his sources can be measured is the notion that all three companies are going to suddenly obsolete their own IM clients and replace them with some surprising new thing.
That would indeed be a coup for this blogger to have gotten early word on such an event. In the mean time if you believe it, please contact me to make large bets on the subject.
The other thing not mentioned by the article or much of the speculation I've seen on it is that at least some of the IM protocols use peer to peer connections once the two parties have located one another. Remember, if everyone in the universe had a fixed IP address there would probably have never been a need for IM clients at all. Once two parties have identified that they are both on at the same time a direct connection can (and probably should) be established. The only reason we needed servers in the first place was because everyone's IP address keeps changing these days.
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Acutally, my take on that is that they're not making it an exclusive group as you suggest, just not allowing completely unrestricted access to the world. Anyone who runs a server could work with them, if they're willing to cooperate on authentication and spam control.
Somewhat similar really to how people running SMTP servers cooperate with others, except that they're starting with a whitelist instead of gradually blacklisting abusers.