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The Balkanization of Chatting

Posted by Unknown on from the just-use-xmpp dept.

JThaddeus writes "Slashdot's own (or former) CmdrTaco has a posting on the Washington Post's website where he discusses how chat apps have overtaken SMS. Yeah, they are cheap. There's no telecom fee per message or for some number of messages per month. However 'The problem of course is that these systems are annoyingly incompatible with each other. My phone can buzz with chat notifications from 3 different apps at any moment. My desktop has even more scattered across browser tabs and standalone apps.' Ditto, nor do I want to hassle learning some app or trying to understand its who's-listening settings. I'll stick to email and to occasional SMS."

8 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Come back by Zerth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IRC still loves you.

  2. Didn't Trillian do this? by trazom28 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Back in the pre-SMS days, http://www.trillian.im/ Trillian did this nicely. You would think there would be an app to combine all as well. Couldn't be that hard if it's been done once before.

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    1. Re:Didn't Trillian do this? by tgd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "everywhere" is a bit of a stretch. Pidgin doesn't support any of the most popular networks: whatsapp, bbm, ...

      Facebook: 1b users
      Skype: 700m users
      MSN: 500m users
      etc ...

      I don't think "most" means what you think it means.

    2. Re:Didn't Trillian do this? by ilsaloving · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean like XMPP, which is an official chatting protocol that allows for virtually every method of communication currently in use today?

      Google Talk uses that, but nobody else does, because all these companies like having total control of their messaging networks and have no business interest in playing nice with others.

    3. Re:Didn't Trillian do this? by ottothecow · · Score: 3, Insightful
      He clearly was referring to the sms-replacement systems. Yes, people talk on facebook chat from phones, but its not the same as whatsapp, bbm, imessage, etc.

      Honestly, I think imessage is something apple has mostly done right. You go to compose an SMS and it detects if the recipient has a compatible device. If so, it sends it as a data packet through imessage; if not, it sends an SMS. The thing that they have done stupidly wrong is that all mutli-recipient messages coming from an iphone are sent as an MMS (picture message, even if it is only text) rather than a standard SMS text message. If you have any friends who don't use smart phones, have a carrier that charges 2-5x as much for MMS as SMS (50c vs 10c), or use google voice, this is fucking terrible.

      Old phones are quite slow to open these messages. Android phones don't even show a preview of the text (since MMS mesages can carry a subject line which is displayed with the notification). Google Voice users on any platform can't receive MMS messages so they just completely miss your text. Anyone who pays per message could end up wasting a lot of money to read your text since not all carriers include picture messages in their standard texting plans. All of this so people can see a list of recipients and reply-all? Reply-all sucks most of the time and if you really want to do this, why not just email everyone...if they are receiving it and responding, they probably have a smartphone with email anyways.

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  3. XMPP? by WOOFYGOOFY · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No?

  4. Re:How to monetize an open standard. by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For sending text messages. Do you want to have ads? Do you want your chats monitored and your data sold? Do you want to pay a monthly, weekly per message fee for your messages that you send? A government who will offer the service for free, you pay for it in taxes.

    For standard SMS text messages they get somehow added to your phone bill, I personally think they should be a LOT CHEAPER. But you do get a common protocol, because everyone else is doing it.

    The other texting methods are incompatible with each other because they all have different rules on how they are funded and supported. The monetary gain must be related to the volume of the texting.

    really then how come email does not suffer the same problem? It works on all platforms has free services that all work together, and has free clients with no adds. what is the difference here?

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  5. Re:How to monetize an open standard. by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    really then how come email does not suffer the same problem? It works on all platforms has free services that all work together, and has free clients with no adds. what is the difference here?

    The difference is that the email system was created before the internet was monetized, and the current chat systems except for irc were all created afterwards.

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