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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.'"
Select Quotes FTA...
When do we get to the "rant" part? This is boring.
It was a nice trip down memory lane, so don't knock yourself about it. I have fond memories of ICQ with buddies on Captured.com, planetquake.com and late nite mapping sessions with the UH-OH echoing into my brain. And then there was that dreaded song -- you know what I'm talking about. ICQ invaded MTV. Ack -- **flips channel**.
What makes Jabber truly great is that it is a decentralized system.
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. They may have a bottom line to think about, yet we are not in business as free-thinking human beings to serve the needs of one company. What we tend to want always comes first, we are all very selfish -- centralized and independant. We do not want to give control to anyone. We want to save it for ourselves, because we have learned from our mistakes and we know what happens when you trust something far bigger than you.
We want to be free, open, decentralized.
But at Google, it's all about centralization. That's their way. The information they have access to at any given moment is insane, and I think it's the primary reason they believe so strongly in centralization, so that they can collect more information.
It's time to embrace a truly workable and distributed topology that will move us past these ridiculous incompatibilities.
I concur.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
the article starts with "This LiveJournal entry by Nugget..."
That is, after all, the point of open source, is it not?
Surely it's too early to be slating what they're doing with this technology. Don't you think they might be taking an incremental approach?
Then again, I *do* sound like another Google apologist, don't I?
A truly open system would not require YET ANOTHER FREAKIN' EMAIL ADDRESS. I have like seven email addresses, although I use only one. The rest are needed for IM services.
Google Talk will not be successful until Google management realize this.
More
caused by the service's complete lack of XMPP server-to-server communication support
I tried to explain to my 15-year-old niece how she shouldn't use Google Talk because of its lack of support for XMPP server-to-server communication. Then she discovered some new emoticons and stopped paying attention to me.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Remember this is still in a very early beta stage. On the developer page, they claim that they're moving toward interoperability with other networks and fully documenting the custom VOIP protocol they use.
They encourage people to comment in the Google
Talk Interoperability Google Group. It seems like they're trying to determine how to balance openness with security, privacy concerns (i.e., avoiding spam). I frankly don't know enough about Jabber, etc. to know if this is BS or not, but it sounds reasonable enough to me.
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
Their client may not run on Linux yet but you can use Google Talk on Linux using gAIM or another Jabber complient client: http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html
It has been out for a week or so, and we should cut them some slack as they work out the kinks and add new features. GMail lacked a number of things I wanted it to have when it first came out, but Google seems to be slowly adding them with time. Google seems too happy to call things beta for just about forever, but at this stage I think we all should consider it as a real beta and just wait and see
What do you know I wrote a novel
Thank you Slashdot editors, please continue to keep me informed of any breaking news stories from this "LiveJournal" news organization.
If only S2S was the only Jabber feature that Google "left out" when rolling out GTalk... but they also forgot to activate all these standard jabber features
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I'm getting freaking tired of people trashing google everytime they put out a beta!
Yes..it might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread but the POINT of releasing test software is for TESTING and feedback!
It's OK to trash the BETA, but don't mistake that by saying "Well....it sucks gonads. Google failed...I'll never use it again"
I'm pretty sure that if you actually read the google talk FAQ that they mention linking up with other networks in the future but they haven't implemented it yet. But why should we let facts get in the way of a good rant?
"Of course it is, Google has stocks now, things have changed, along with Google. You shouldn't act so surprised, what with everyone here saying Google will change once it offers stock."
So really nothing has changed then. Google has always had stock and has always wanted to make money. The only difference is that you and I can buy it now.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
Something I've noticed with the whole Google talk thing is that even the people I know who are hardcore Linux geeks say "How is this better than AIM?"
I must say this is somewhat surprising... one of the tenets of the greatness of Linux is the openness and freedom to innovate - why does nobody care about the fact that IM has had almost no innovations lately?
Google promoting Jabber could be a great thing, assuming they will enable the server to server support. IM could become more of an open service where people actually CAN innovate, rather than a closed protocol run on some corporation's servers.
So, even if you are afraid of Google becoming powerful, or if you think that IM innovation is dead, I'm willing to carry at least some hope that getting Jabber into wider use could be a big deal in evolving how IM works. Just a thought...
I thought it was a Google product family
Gmail Beta
Gmaps Beta
Gtalk Beta
Leaders in the jabber community have made it fairly clear that s2s support just hasn't been coded yet. Its on its way.
Have you EVER used e-mail before? Same concept here. Read the article before you trash what you don't understand.
I am positive that they are trying to figure out how to control SPAM that would happen if they opened up the S2S portion of their server.
Imagine if google would open it's talk.google.com for server-to-server communication with other jabbers around.
..
Y! opens a jabber2yahoo bridge
MSN opens a jabber2msn bridge
AOL opens a jabber2aol bridge
..
Everybody would be happy, except for Y!, MSN and AOL.
Happend before, with Inbox size!
And they could keep their voice algorithms for their use, a hell with them! for a couple of years, until it becomes a standard feature, I can agree with that.
Then they should open this too:D
gtkaml.org
I used to use e-mail constantly, but the signal to noise ratio is like 1:300 these days.
Same concept here.
Where the *hell* are the typewriter key sounds?
:-)
How do I know I'm actually typing anything without it?
-chargen
Everyone come down out of their ivory towers and quit trumpeting how great they are for pointing out yet another reason why Google ain't the bees knees. Climb down out of your ivory towers and take a nice dose of reality.
Incremental improvements are a good thing - Starting w/ the absolute minimum feature set and building on it, all along making sure it works as advertised is a sound strategy. This approach allows you to continuously improve the software, and focus on addressing the issues that arise with the current feature set in a manageable way instead of having to address a mass of problems from all of the half-assed features you had to squeeze in because you had to have all of the bells, whistles, and even legit features. A frequent improvement/release cycle is a common practice for open source software products and Google is adopting a similar approach for its service.
You can't simulate this kind of load accurately - Sure you can run computer models of how the traffic load will behave and how the infrastructure will handle it, but you really don't know how it's going to work until you start putting some real user load on the system. By limiting the feature set, and in particular limiting inter-server communications you naturally limit the amount of load on the system. The users aren't going to switch completely from their current service to GTalk all in one day... so as traffic builds they can adjust the service settings, tweak the servers, do whatever to make sure they can continue to provide a quality service. And back to point #1... once you have a good understanding of the traffic patterns and capacity you can begin introducing new features that may change those patterns in a controlled way.
You can't predict how people will abuse the system - By limiting the feature set Google can better ensure that the system is not seriously abused by individuals who would want to use the system in a way that would annoy/harm the general user population or impact system performance. Connecting to other servers is a risky proposition that deserves careful attention and control to ensure that it works correctly. If Google make a misstep here and allows spammers to spam all of their users, and virii to spread across their system, and poorly managed Jabber servers to cause their messages to not reach their intended destinations you'll have a system that most people wouldn't want to trouble themselves with using. Google can start by controlling the environment while providing a base set of services... and then expand in a way that they can monitor and control to ensure that service is not impacted.
Get real feedback from real users - Instead of dreaming up a hundred things users probably want and squabbling over them internally, why not just release a base product that people will use and get direct feedback from them on what they want. This is what Google has setup... now they can ask their users do you want to jabber w/ other non-GTalk servers? Do you want more emoticons? What about real voice call capabilities? What about being able to search your conversations? What about... The point is let the users help direct the next round of development instead of spending a lot of time developing features for people who don't use the product.
Protect the service the customers want - The underlying principle behind all of this is that you have customers who want a service. The way to attract and keep those customers is by offering them a service they want and that works. Google has started by offering GTalk to a group of users. They'll hone the system, make sure it works, and if it meets their objectives and draws in customers they'll continue to expand on it's feature set in a way that keeps their customers from moving to some other service and continues to attract other customers... all the while being very careful not to make the service unstable or give something to their customers only to have to take it away (premature release of poorly test
No, with IM you only receive messages from people you have authorised (your friends). And if you're getting a SNR or 300:1 with them, it's time to find some new friends.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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.
First a fairly standard reply:
Thank you for your input on open communications. We appreciate your thoughts on how Google can build a communications network that is open, promotes user choice, and protects consumers' rights. While we may not be able to respond directly to all feedback, we do appreciate your input, and it will be taken into account as we do our part to help promote open communications.
If you've expressed interest in federating your service with the Google Talk service, we will respond to you shortly.
Sincerely,
The Google Talk Team
After that I got a not so standard and more interesting one, I have contacted as a company I have that gives XMPP service hosting, and this is what I got:
Hello MyNameHere,
Thanks for your interest in federating with the Google Talk service. While this is not something that is enabled today with our beta service, we hope to enable it shortly.
When we have more information to share, it will be posted to http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html.
I'll also follow up again on this mail with details when we have them.
Regards,
The Google Talk Team
So I think that all depends on what Google understands as "shortly".