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Google Drops XMPP Support
Cbs228 writes "During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users. Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype."
Interesting, because Google Wave was based on XMPP and Google was integral to the creation of the Jingle extension that enabled video chatting over XMPP. Note that no end date has been set for Talk yet, but the end must surely be nigh given Google's recent history of axing products like Reader and CalDAV support from their calendar app without much notice.
My phone told me that an update to google talk was available, and that it would be replaced with hangouts. Google+ hasnt had a lot of traction with me, so I am not really sure if this is just going to be one less google product that I will be using now.
Ok, so Google Talk is going away at some point, everyone I talk to who uses a different tool will no longer be reachable with "Hangouts", and I'll be confined only to my excruciatingly small circle of Google+ friends...
Why should I use Hangouts? It talks to only a few people in my circle of friends, all of whom also have accounts with some non-google resource.
Wouldn't this be yet another reason to abandon Google+? I mean, it's great 'n all, but almost nobody I know uses it. Which kinda defeats the purpose of a social network. It's like, let's invent a social network for hermits. Nobody talks to you, but that's what, you know, is supposed to happen. I haven't heard of anything so useless since the Anarchists Union.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Shame on you Google. I've used Gtalk since it was released. I don't care about the cross platform communication much, but do have a few friends that I know connected to me through other platform. I have convinced several rather computer illiterate friends to use Gtalk so that we could keep in touch by IMs and know when each other was available, introducing them to Google and getting them a Google account in the process. I have no interest in Google's "social media" offerings, or any social media platform for that matter, including Facebook (let the NSA get their info on me in other ways, I'm not going to do their job for them). I really don't even know what Google Hangouts is, but the name tells me that I don't want to know and I will not switch to it when Gtalk goes away (although that seems to not even be an option since my main desktops usually run Windows).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... Ignoring the fact that Google+ has 390Million Active accounts...
I'll buy that if by "active" you mean "someone said I should try it so I signed up and checked it out for an afternoon" or "I was forced to join Google+ to read the messages of a Groups thread someone pointed me to" or "I have a Google+ account? When did that happen? Oh, I guess I accidentally signed me up yesterday!" then sure.
E pluribus unum
...calm down, Ignoring the fact that Google+ has 390Million Active accounts
Which doesn't mean a whole lot, since having a Google account at all now is basically a Google+ account. Signing up for Youtube means you are an "Active" google+ account.
Of course you would know that if you used Google Talk
You have always been able to add multiple users to Google Talk without needing Google+.
There are some serious privacy concerns with Google+, and a lot of people smart enough to avoid the whole Facebook clusterfuck are not at all keen to surrender to Google even if Google appears to be somewhat more responsible with your data.
I've never found a problem sending pictures to people, even groups of people. Why do you feel you need to surrender all your privacy instead of just emailing a photo?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
My google calenders are all still working with Thunderbird. I went to the parent link and at the bottom of that blog post, they have an update where they reversed their decision to end CalDAV support. They say: "Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV."
So I guess making a stink really can make Google change their minds.
It is, despite attempts by the PC police to make it otherwise..
You don't get to decide when a word is pejorative to a group that's historically been targeted with it. I agree strongly with George Carlin when he talks about the ludicrousness of "bad words." There are no "bad words." But you know what there *are?* There are words that have been used offensively against a minority group so often that they've become hurtful *to* that group of people.
You have a right to use those words anyway. You have a right to not care. You have a right to claim that because YOU don't find the word offensive, no one else has a right to do so, either.
You also have a right to decide that decades of discrimination against a particular group were so awful, you'll avoid using a word or two -- not because those words are "bad," but because they serve as reminders of abuse, insults, and ignorance. You have a right to decide to change your speaking habits *ever* so slightly as a way of demonstrating to this person or persons that you don't agree with the way those words were used against them.
You have a right to decide that empathy and acknowledgement is more meaningful than saying a certain collection of phonemes.
Or not to.
It's not actually a generic pejorative though, it's a common pejorative among 13-year olds.
The effect is that using it as an adult makes you sound childish...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
People are dicks. Get over it. I've been called a thousand different offensive names in my life. We're all different and it's in our evolutionary behavior to exclude those that seem "Different" in any way we can to keep dominance over the group/tribe whatever... They key is realizing this, and letting the dumb be dumb. Words really can't hurt you, only your own insecurities can.
What's hilarious and ironic is that you here are doing the Exact Same Thing. You've chosen to single out those you feel are insensitive, you've categorized them and you're trying to exclude them. I'm willing to bet that you even have your own pet names for them as well... redneck, teabagger, white trash, bigot. You are as they are, human. If you've found a better way to live your life, then do so. Ridiculing those that don't follow your lead is... well... just as bad as calling them fags. It's just a different made up word meant to make them feel bad and not mate with your wife.
I've never found a problem sending pictures to people, even groups of people. Why do you feel you need to surrender all your privacy instead of just emailing a photo?
I am in kind of awe at this? I cannot dumb myself down enough to respond.
Or are you just not intelligent enough to respond? While e-mail is not to be considered secure, it's a damn sight more secure than the social-network-flavor-of-the-month. Or do you only use Google's e-mail system and therefore they already know everything about you?
I've never found a problem sending pictures to people, even groups of people. Why do you feel you need to surrender all your privacy instead of just emailing a photo?
This is something a lot of Slashdotters - especially the "privacy" tinfoil hat crowd, not that I'm saying that includes you - fail to grasp about the popularity of Facebook. The fundamental tradeoff of social networking sites is that you willingly give up some of your privacy - on the information you choose to make public - in exchange for making the information you consume from others less obtrusive.
For example: I use Facebook and have accumulated around 200+ friends, ranging from best friends to interesting people I met at a conference or my child's preschool. If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos. I would blacklist them all from my mailbox to avoid hundreds of spams a day and would only communicate with my very closest friends.
But with Facebook (or Google+ if anyone else I knew actually used it), people can post as much or as little as they like and I can consume that content as much or as little as I like. For you, the experience all depends on how often you want to check your social networking site. Many of my friends are Facebook-obsessed zombies, and they can check and post to FB all day, commenting back and forth all day on each others' cute cat pictures. For me, I check FB every week or so when I'm bored, and it will only show me updates from the friends I correspond with the most - but if I have time to kill and want to see what my freshman year roommate is doing, I can keep reading to see. Or if I'm going to meet a friend I haven't seen in a while, I can skim through their profile to catch up. At any rate, I have a feed of "social" information that I can pay as much or as little attention to as I like, and can easily keep in touch with a much broader range of people than I otherwise would have if I had to restrict the list to just the people I wanted to get regular e-mails from.
"95% of all Slashdot
I don't usually say this, but mod this AC up! I don't know what the hell Larry is smoking, but it's like he's trapped inside a reversed RDF that completely hides the real world from him. Well, either that or he's the most two-faced liar I've seen outside of a career politician in years...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Pretty soon they'll drop HTML support
One word. "Apps."
For example: I use Facebook and have accumulated around 200+ friends, ranging from best friends to interesting people I met at a conference or my child's preschool. If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch,
Why would someone you met at a conference send you a picture of their lunch?
The tradeoff with facebook is not what you think it is. It's not about making the content you consume from others less obtrusive, it removes the burden to them of figuring out who to share things with.
In other words, I'm saying life is not better when someone posts every piece of crap online without thinking and relies on their "friends" to sort out what they want to see.
To me, anyone who does, is saying they are too lazy to even think about who they want to communicate with.
That interesting person from the conference, if he was required to think about it, would never decide to send you photos of his lunch in the first place. So the burden of deciding whether or not to see it has been shifted off him entirely and onto you.