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Russian Google Competitor Embraces Open Source Messaging
rm writes "Internet search and mail provider Yandex, which many view to be Google's main competitor in Russia, has recently added an instant messaging capability to its mail notifier application Ya.Online. As it turns out, the IM service is based on the open XMPP protocol, with connectivity to all other public Jabber servers available from day one. MacOS X and GNU/Linux versions of the app were also released (complete with sources under the GPL) and are determined to be based on the Psi IM client. Yandex looks to be a firm believer in open-source, also running a mirror site for FOSS and actively promoting its branded version of Firefox. Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia."
wow, that's backwards
They're communists! Duh.
The summary makes it sound like this is some major advantage over Google. GTalk is also based on XMPP.
But hey, Slashdot needs to pay the bills, and this makes a great Slashvertisment for Yandex.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
If I knew how to communicate in the Russian language, I'd probably be masturbating to Yandex brand right now.
N/T
"Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia."
Why?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Looking at that disaster of a front page, I'd say these guys are competing with Yahoo, not Google.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Google seems to have a "competitor" in every major contry. But why is anything they do relevant to those of us not living in Russia?
... a thousand Soviet Russia jokes.
Meh.
Why not?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Gchat also uses XMPP, and you can use any client that supports the protocol, like say Pidgin.
Well my karma is in the way down, might as well encourage it!
Can't it be just joined, takes up.. emm .. anything else?
I always wondered why different people from every part of the world came to "embrace" open source?
This open source guy must be a very cosy man .. or a very good kisser ;)
What does this have to do with Yandex?
You don't see many people boycotting Google for the war in Iraq.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/06/2350233&from=rss">
If you were shooting for +5 Insightful, your best bet on Slashdot would have been replacing "Russia" with "United States" and "Georgia" with "Iraq".
The more you know.
I was wondering about the status of open source in Russia. I knew they had recently invaded the neighboring country of Georgia and had been involved in some atrocities against civilians and journalists, but in the midst of all that I was like, "hey, where is this country with the whole open source thing?" Thank you for your efforts to clear this up.
And replace "Russia[or US]" with "Israel" and replace "Georgia[or Iraq]" with "Lebanon".
[ Looks back on Prague-smashed-by-Russian tanks-in-1968. ]
But the US left Iraq democratic and free (to do it wants after 2010. The US got no benefit from Iraq and a massive black eye. The Russians have a post-WW-II history of destroying everything they touch that makes Bush pale by comparison. Why give them a free pass in Georgia?
You did not read 1984, did you?
Even if Yandex wishes to believe this, it's no competitor even to Yahoo or MSN etc, because it is first a directory with results being ranked based on who paid more. Simply search for 'russkey' in yandex vs any other search engine. First few dozens of pages from yandex will be results of a Russian firm while results from other search engines will be ranked based on the popularity of FF add on.
You can't handle the truth.
XMPP? In Russia we use carrier goat!
for all XMPP clients like psi, gmail and gtalk, it is possible to send SMS over client without installing anything.
You can get the info from www.jabber.org
or go to
http://www.messagingbay.com/smsxmpp.jsp?navi=27
directly.
Why read it when you can live it?
The old school ICQ rules.
1) Numbers instead of weird freaking nickname (e.g. "chunkylover"). I hate coming up with idiotic nicks that I can never remember. On top of that, I rather not send messages to my boss from a "chunkylover" nick. Of course, the ICQ UIN number was just like a phone number - you could still set your name and nickname to whatever you wish. So, if you really wanted to message your boss from a "chunkylover" nick, well you could have.
2) Single message interface default with chat available. If you want to chat with people, then start a chat with them. Most of the time I just send couple of messages here and there. I hate the fact that most of the new messengers force you to leave the message/chat window open the entire time of the conversation. If I wanted to do that, then I may as well use IRC. If you want to yack with someone, then fscking call them. ICQ was sweet because it allowed you to send a quick message and then go back to doing whatever you are doing. Besides, its the best way to message people when your boss is always walking around. Think CTRL+SHIFT+I, type message, ALT+S to send. Takes like 5 sec to do that and you are in the clear.
3) No pop-up messages (it would just blink the systray icon). Don't you just hate when you are playing Quake and the stupid messenger opens up a window and takes focus just before you are about to frag some guy? What about when your boss is looking over your shoulder while you are explaining something to him? 'Nuff said.
Seriously, what the hell happen? ICQ was awesome until stupid AOL bought them out. They screwed up ICQ, Winamp, Waste and Gnutella. Idiots.
I was always hopping that someone would write a small, lightweight messenger that was like original ICQ. And they did - check out www.miranda-im.org. Its GPL!
The only stupid thing is that no one came out with a better service so I still use ICQ.
Thats not really fair.
Show me a public/open protocol used on the internet that has a peice of software that supports ALL of its features.
I don't suspect you'll even be able to find a FULLY compliant SMTP or HTTP client or server. Possibly something on the FTP client list.
HTTP is extensible, once you take that into account its practically impossible to have 100% interoperability. My web browser for instance could give a damn about the fact that IIS says its running ASP.NET crap.
Even my browser doesn't know what to do with the ASP.NET header, it still works. Actually, it does know what to do with it, which is nothing, but thats coincidence in this case. Some other web server could possibly send me a header that DOES require action of some sort, and my browser may not know what to do with it. But I'm not really worried about not viewing pages.
I've been using Openfire as an XMPP server for a few years, a good year within the current company I work for, I've yet to have a problem with connecting between clients for sending IMs, internal or external. I communicate with several people on googles service, and many scattered across the Internet with their own servers, god knows how many clients shared between Linux, OS X, Windows and even an OpenSolaris machine or two.
If you think the xmpp extensions are bad, you should take a look at specs like HTML and CSS. They are certainly 100% doable, but NO ONE does. You do what you need to do to work with most clients/targets the rest is gravy.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
What's NSA in Russian?
You have to embrace it before you can extend and extinguish it.
Duh.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia."
Nah, icq is a sort of a standard here in Russia - everybody has it. Well, Mail.ru Agent (open specs!) is also quite popular, but not to the same extent. I just hope the people at ICQ will simply ban the whole country one day by ip range, like they did with Turkey. Mmm... No more icq...
I wish something open standards would come along that could kill Gadu Gadu in Poland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadu_gadu
The Gadu Gadu client for Windows used to be a lot like the original versions of ICQ, now it is a bloated and ad supported POS. Good luck with it if you want to use it on a Mac or Unix-alike there used to be official clients that worked, but for about two years now using clients other than the official ones has been forbidden with the network. The open source projects have varying degrees of working but it seems that the protocol is tweaked every now and then so it is hard to keep-up.
The summary makes it sound like this is some major advantage over Google. GTalk is also based on XMPP.
But hey, Slashdot needs to pay the bills, and this makes a great Slashvertisment for Yandex.
And THAT was the part you found odd in the summary? I was personally boggled by the "Many view Yandex as Google's main competitor in russia" part.
Oh really? Do they? Maybe that has something to do with the fact that in Russia, Yandex beats Google by a large margin. Yandex has about 40% share while google.ru about 20% share. Google isn't the worst competitor to Yandex, there.
Technically, it is still correct to say that, just like it would be correct to say "Many view google to be Yahoo's main competitor" but it gives wrong image.
Why does this matter? Well, the difference there is big. Everywhere else, some search engine dominates. Hell, in Finland, google.fi has over 90% share. In USA, Google is higher than ever. In china, Baidu beats the crap out of everything else. But in Russia... The "monopoly" one has only 40% share. They all need to actually constantly improve their services to win others.
But at least I now know a good mirror where I can download Linux distros :-)
Shit, I meant Google is_more_than Yandex. Stupid slashcode.
According to the NoScript list of untrusted scripts on slashdot, they are financed by Google Analytics and DoubleClick.
So who pays the bills?
If you've actually visited yandex.com and noticed the big red backward-looking letter "R", then you might be interested to know that it's actually a vowel in the Russian alphabet, pronounced "yah". It's also a pronoun in the Russian language, first-person singular, i.e. equivalent to the English pronoun "I".
So, the term "yandex" replaces the "I" in "Index" with "I", in Russian it comes out "yah" + "ndex" => yandex.
Why "index"? Well all search engines work by building huge inverted indexes (but we slashdotters already knew that, right?).
Wikipedia says it stands for "Yet Another iNDEX". That may be true, but the average Russian citizen, without any knowledge of Western Computer Science, would have no understanding of that cute etymology.
So, the Big Red Yah puts the I back in Index!
HTH,
-Johanus
One advantage of XMPP is that all the traffic goes though the server. That makes it is easier to spy ono the users. ICQ is peer to peer, so ICQ users have more privacy.
See ejabberd home page.
This is a flexible and powerful XMPP server written in Erlang.
Mickael Remond http://www.process-one.net/
Oh, I was being sarcastic.
If you scroll back through the archives, when the US threatened to invade Iraq, every Slashdot thread from top-to-bottom was on fire with Europeans, Indians, Canadians, etc screaming bloody murder.
But several countries have invaded each other since then, even with overtly evil intentions in mind, but you'll see people defend China and Russia into the ground, or simply mod you down, if you've got a blurb to speak about either.
The way I see things, Europe really should be worried about what happened in Georgia. It was an expansionist move and who's to say where they will plan to expand next? It could be Poland for all we know. Of course, the conversations about missile systems in Poland will get a lot of anti-American screaming, as well. That is, until they are needed.
Just think of Russia as a Mac and the US as a PC. :)
The largest ISP in Portugal who detains the largest portal (SAPO) developped (along with the Psi team, like Justin Karneges, one of Psi creators) the SAPO Messenger it's own IM back in 2004 with the same features plus, SMS and VOIP to land lines and mobiles, gateway to MSN,ICQ etc ... so I don't the understand where from came the idea the Russia is such an enterpreneur country.
_________________________________________________
http://www.eyeball.com/products/messenger.html
I don't know if there is any difference since I've not used the apps. But eventually there are so I better mention it.
Holy shit, their firefox version is way at 3.5.2.
In Soviet Russia, open source embrace you!