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Google Drops XMPP Support

Posted by Unknown on from the do-not-evil-yeah-right dept.

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.

1 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing to do with Google+ by tuppe666 · · Score: 1, Troll

    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

    ...calm down, Ignoring the fact that Google+ has 390Million Active accounts...or that Android has passed 900Million Activations (Facebook has 700Million Active users). It works straight from gmail which has over 425Million users...hell there is even an iPhone app. Hell you can load it up...and still chat to people only using talk!

    There are advantages to having a Google+ account, but its pretty limited...you can chat to 10 users at once. The bottom line though the success of Google+(growing faster than twitter, While Facebook suffers fatigue) its not part of this discussion.