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.

Comments

not surprising

[berashith]

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.

How does this help Google+?

[roc97007]

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.

Re:How does this help Google+?

[DerekLyons]

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.

I'm asking myself the same question about Picasa - Google has made it very difficult to share pictures outside of their ecosystem.
 

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.

Google has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they don't "get" social - and equally has demonstrated a stunning inability to learn from their past mistakes.

Re:How does this help Google+?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.

That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.

I suspect that federation(at least outside of paying customers, who are both more important to listen to, and less likely to be spambots), is viewed as more trouble than it's worth; but dropping XMPP entirely is an entirely different game.

Bad call, loss of users

[frovingslosh]

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).

Re:Nothing to do with Google+

[samkass]

... 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.

Re:Google+ has 390Million Actice users

[icebike]

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?

Re:Bad Google

[Dputiger]

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.

Re:Bad Google

[macshit]

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...

Re:Google+ has 390Million Actice users

[schnell]

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.