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Google Talk Claims Openness, Lacks S2S Support

Posted by Hemos on from the unhappiness-in-the-joy dept.

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.'"

7 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Central Me by Sanity · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
    All he is suggesting is that they implement the same openness for IM that Google did for webmail. Right now, Google Talk is analogous to a version of GMail that only allowed users to send email to other GMail users. He is not asking Google to be any less centralised with Google Talk than they already are with GMail.

    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.

  2. Encryption support? by base3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Encryption support? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There still isn't a good protocol for end to end encryption over Jabber. The problem is that you need some way of exchanging keys that can be done over an untrusted network, and such a thing doesn't really exist. I've been pushing for a web-of-trust based approach, and there seems to be some support for it, but it will take a while before it is adopted. In the mean time, there are a few clients which use things like GPG and rely on exchanging keys out-of-band (or use the old GPG JEP which is laughably insecure).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:If only by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Given that rather shocking list of missing features, I'm assuming they are writing their own server from scratch and they haven't implemented file transfers yet (given how many ways to do that in Jabber there are I'm not surprised). Maybe S2S support is missing for the same reason?

    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.

  4. Re:If only by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Re:Central Me by GoRK · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Central Me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > 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.