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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.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
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filter error: don't use so many caps. it's like yelling.
filter error: don't use so many caps. it's like yelling.
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Ben Dover !!
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.
and thanks for all the fish...
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.
Does anyone know whether the new protocol will be undocumented or if it is documented, if there is any resemblance to xmpp? Hopefully Google will allow xmpp bridges.
I am just worried that Google is trying to do more to force us to use their tools, rather than allowing us to use our favourite messaging clients., but with their service.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's news to me that Google is dropping iCal support from Calendar. The whole rationale for them dropping support for ActiveSync was that standards based iCalendar support was available and most devices support that now (ie noone uses Windows Phone, they are all using Android or iPhone). So does someone have a supporting reference for that, or is the Unknown Lamer just confused?
I'm afraid posting a complaint on Slashdot will do nothing about this issue.
Nothing beats its simplicity to me.
It sure isn't easy getting all your friends on it, but sooner or later they will come back when they get tired of their current service trying to be everything at once, spreading itself too thin.
Having tons of different services for everything is hard to remember and work with, but the same is true for one service that does tons of different things.
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.
I thought that what they were eliminating was XMPP federation, which is what's used to link all the different XMPP servers
But that's a far cry from eliminating XMPP entirely. I understood that they were continuing to use XMPP, with some extensions, and since those extensions were not supported by others, they were disabling the federation to other systems.
If I have to use Chrome to use g+ features then fuck off. And that goes for any service that requires a specific browser. Fuck you and your closed protocols. You are IE6 to me now.
I want this account deleted.
My friends and I used to be on Hotmail using MSN Messenger. Then we moved to Gmail when Messenger died, using Pidgin to keep everyone in the same circle (Yahoo, Gmail, and the few Hotmail stragglers). Now XMPP is gone, that leaves everyone looking for a new chat protocol, hopefully one within Pidgin.
It feels a bit like an open chat registry might be the way to go, as companies phase out their support for pure chat clients. I still need to chat and Facebook isn't going to cut it.
It's not clear to me whether or not they're totally going to drop it.
Still, I think this blows.
Pretty soon they'll drop HTML support
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
They really should change their company slogan.
Where is the difference to asshole MS of the 90s? Can't see it.
How any serious geek can defend or use google is beyond me.
The old days of Google acting as a good net citizen are long gone. Money always corrupts, and its envy of Facebook and Apple walled gardens became irresistible.
Android is a sort of open garden, but Google got a taste of running a walled one with Android's Market/Play, and cemented its walls with Google+ and by making a full Google Account mandatory for it, Gmail's pseudonymous users absolutely not welcome. In the end, it'll be just another Facebook for a captive audience as advertising targets. Very profitable.
Dropping XMPP is just part of this process. A window to the walled garden was open and it was allowing federation to be done out of control by the Google empire. Easy to see this block coming and the window being closed.
The IETF specifically mentions interoperability as a founding goal in its Mission Statement. By dropping interoperability with other IM providers through XMPP, Google is making very clear where it now stands. It wants the whole cake, and being a good net citizen be damned.
This is a 180 degree term to their old philosophy of open source / open protocols.
Google+ hasnt had a lot of traction
This is nothing to so with Google+ in fact you can use it from your Gmail account, as for Google+ its been going through some changes just lately...and its getting a lot of traction from other users. There are advantages of using Google+ which are group video calls; Sending Photos to everyone in your hangout; Start a hangout with the right people (Circle :)
Of course you would know that if you used Google Talk
I always thought it was so weird when people used shit like MSN or Yahoo! for their chat. When someone gave me that as their IM contact, I would just tell them "look, I'm probably never going to end up talking to you, then, because I'm not going to setup an account on a proprietary service just to talk to one person".
Anyone that uses Google Voice for voip outside of gmail is routing their calls through Google Talk. This is pretty popular on Android using SIP and a pbx account but there are also some standalone applications that handle it. If Google ends up dropping Google Talk there are going to be a lot of pissed off Google Voice users.
They're embracing and extending XMPP, but by denying federation it's no longer XMPP, just based on it.
Although this is not exactly MS-style "embrace, extend, extinguish", it's not very different in practice. It's still deliberately obstructive of standards and interoperability.
Where is the difference to asshole MS of the 90s?
I'm sorry to correct you Microsoft went nowhere, in fact it got worse after the 90's. It fact Microsoft is the dame abusive Monopoly it always was. It just has to compete with Google and Apple who it can neither bribe or Bully, and it has been unable to leverage its monopoly onto Mobile, where Google and Apple dominate.
I still need to chat and Facebook isn't going to cut it.
Maybe not for you, but for most people I think it will. Most of the Internet users on the planet have Facebook accounts and it's increasingly the best way to chat or contact anyone. Google is pretty much just driving people back to Facebook with this. As long as it's all proprietary, you might as well go with the one with the biggest available group.
E pluribus unum
..how did that go again?
Actually, that's the nice thing about XMPP - there are LOTS of XMPP servers (sometimes also called Jabber servers). A list of public (free) servers can be found at https://list.jabber.at/ The great thing about Jabber/XMPP (and the thing that Google just shut off), is that jabber servers can find each other on the net. Therefore, if you have an account as alice@jabber.org, and your friend has the account bob@example.com, you can message each other just as you do now. the XMPP server at jabber.org will find the XMPP server at example.com and give it your message for bob to deliver. It's just like e-mail - only in real (or close to) time.
Just deleted Google Chrome off my computers and have never felt so happy I run my own jabber server.
I wonder how long until Google will retire Gtalk for good so that Google+ can take over in a bid to get more than 4 users.
I've been using AIM since the 90s... I was using the 5.9 version which was basically meant for Windows 98 because all it did was chat, opposed to their newer monstrosities. I only recently started using Trillian instead of the old aim client, which is just another client similar to Pidgin in functionality.
I'm kind of curious how long AIM will last.
This is old news. This was one of the first comments on the "Google releases Hangouts" a few days ago.
I've lost contact with about 40% of my contacts so far. Of those whom I can still talk to, about 20% use google with an xmpp client, and the other 40% are not google users (they use some other XMPP server).
This mostly comes down to a battle between 2x platforms: Google vs. Microsoft. I consider myself a pretty avid Microsoft supporter, but if you look at the facts, I kind of think that Microsoft started this fight by:
1) Buying Skype and pitting Skype against Talk.
2) Their Scroogled campaign that pitted Outlook against Gmail
3) Connecting Outlook.com to the Talk API when Google would have preferred that Microsoft federate skype/outlook/hotmail/live/passport via XMPP.
It's that third point surrounding XMPP federation that this all comes down to. When Microsoft decided to not federate via XMPP with the Outlook/Skype consumer products they were saying that they only wanted to establish 1-way communication with Google's platform. There is no doubt that this pissed Google off because Microsoft is trying to take away their market share while also taking advantage of their services and open architecture. Google's offered up XMPP for many years and Microsoft never connected until they had a mail product that was capable of trading market share (in one direction).
Microsoft is clearly not against XMPP because they do support XMPP in their commercial IM product, Lync (which I'm a regular user of and competent in supporting/deploying). I've considered many scenarios but can't figure out why Microsoft wouldn't want to enable XMPP for its consumer products as a way of communicating with Google Talk contacts other than to discourage interoperability with their consumer products; e.g. keep everyone on Skype.
I know that some might argue that Microsoft connected to Google the way they did so that it could pull over all of your Google Contacts and already authorized XMPP invites, but in my opinion they could have just showed you a list of all your current Google Talk XMPP contacts and asked you to place check marks next to any that you wanted to invite to your Microsoft Account contact list. With all that said, maybe its as simple as that someone in the right position at Microsoft failing to comprehend the scenario.
Really retarded isn't it? The point of social networking is to have as much as your social network be connected, even it means they are using a different provider. Limiting the support is effectively asking their users to only socialize with people in the platform. Not a very bright move if you're trying to increase user base to overtake the incumbent...
Google seems to be thinking like Microsoft/Apple these days..
This isn't evil; it's stupid. It's not even embrace/extend/extinguish. It's embrace/back_off/get_forgotten. Google is kidding themselves if they think anyone cares about .. what's the name of their obscure niche chat product again?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I had the interesting experience not long ago of being interviewed for a job via Hangout Video Chat. I just had to install the Google Video plugin.
I thought it was all very silly because I was using the wireless in a cafe not a quarter mile from the company I was interviewing with. Why on earth they didn't just have me into their office is beyond me. But I got a second interview, and am now awaiting their decision.
I used Firefox, and didn't have any trouble with it.
However, I had already signed up with Google+ from a different email account. I didn't really want to register for Google+ from the account that I used to apply for the job, as it is a secret email I give to very few, so as to keep a lid on spam.
Google seems to be thinking like Microsoft/Apple these days..
Well actually Google is not thinking like either. Apple managed to cash in on early adopter money three times...but failed to compete in a mature market, its early monopoly status thrown away for sitting on huge about of cash, Microsoft throwing it all away to chance mobile market share by dumbing down its Desktop experience to that of a tablet :), Google is doing neither of those things.
Neither Apple or Microsoft is competing in the social networking sphere (ignoring photo sharing sites) and both were happy to ride the Facebook integration, the thrust of your post...although both have stepped back their integration in light of certain developments around the Andoird Phone/App Facebook thing whatever that was. In fact Google is the only one taking on Facebook and is doing a great job at it.
Ironically to need a Google+ account to use Hangouts
i dont wonder google has to do some move like this with so many people not getting it.
I loathe them for this, but they have been trying to play nice with all the rest of the chats echo systems... but others, like microsoft, only allowed communication in one direction... rendering yourself irrelevant... with enough of them milking google and google looking the irrelevant one being the one playing nice, it just got tired and said...... okay, i have the largest dick around... if you dont want to play nice, lets play rude instead...
I dislike this move, but i hope it kills some of his enemies milking so much without giving anything is not nice
Google starts projects and kills them off as much as people change their underwear...
But there is a challenge to GMail coming that is privacy based!.
See:
https://startmail.com
I can't wait untill the beta testing starts - which is soon based on the email I got tonight. I use https://startpage.com instead of Google, and soon I'll be able to dump GMail. I don't mess with Google+ - why would anyone.....
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.
Other than SMS, people still use IM? Is the Internet populated solely by 14 year old basement dwellers and 50 year old ASL pervs?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Google starts projects and kills them off as much as people change their underwear...
Microsoft Kills Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software
Apple Kill Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_discontinued_by_Apple_Inc.
Get over it
I do think its sensible to invest time into open source products(and more importantly formats), but do not expect proprietary software to be the same. Although suggesting Goolge is unique or alone at replacing unprofitable software is simply laughable.
Seriously Google needs to look at how much shaving off the Do no Evil badge will impair their brand.
Personally there are three products I use and think are important from Google.
1) Google search - best search I know.
2) Being able to ask a query (Google search) through the browser address bar, hence Chrome.
3) Chrome - best browser I know (Mac)
These are very heavily counterbalanced by the very close to evil if not evil level of disregard for / productization of private information.
I also am feeling fatigue from how in your face Google is. If they have a dream of stealing eyeballs from Facebook fatigue well, Google is leading the pack on fatigue - being sold, being networked, etc. If they every happen to make a not-evil service that becomes popular for some group of people, it will be axed in a year. So I have stopped looking to Google for solutions and this has cost them a lot of good will / care about what they do in my book. They constantly cut themselves off at the knees and are becoming more microsoftian each year.
If Google would focus on search and making things useful for people (like for example, contextual help and debugging through a knowledge base and context recognizer running on mac/pc/linux/android) they can do well. But their constant failures in the social and product development realm is a serious distraction. Google needs to reevaluate if they want to be seen as relevant. They don't actually have anything except the ad and phone business that seems worth their billions of cap.
Over the course of this year Googles has shown an quickly diminishing quality in handling how to treat and communicate with it's users:
Maybe someone should teach Larry Page how to find the meaning of "forever." I heard there is a company that specializes in finding web pages about specific topics. I wonder if that could assist in teaching him what forever means. My understanding is forever is a very long time and not just until later the same day another employee decides to announce it will be discontinued.
Gtalk is a small light memory demand application. I generally set it up to run whenever a computer boots. A browser is much more memory intensive. To use the Gmail page as a Gtalk client you not only would have to keep the browser running whenever someone else might want to talk to you, but you would have to keep a browser window open on your Gmail page. And aside from the memory demand issue, that could also be a big security issue, particularly if you want to be available from computers that others might get access to, such as from work. I don't log out of my computer every time that I go to get a coffee refill, and don't want to, and sometimes those little trips outside of one's office can turn into multi-hour meetings or firefights. I wouldn't want to get into the habit of leaving my browser logged into my personal mail account (or have to have multiple ones that my friends are expected to search through to find me), it is just too much of a security risk.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In my quest to ditch Yahoo! Messenger once and for all, I decided to settle on Google Talk and MSN Messenger (MSN allowed messaging with Y! users). Then, Microsoft abandons the MSN Messenger service in favor of Skype--oh, great. One down, that means I can still use Pidgin for Google now at least. And now... Google fucking decides to abandon Google Talk for Hangouts.
As a Pidgin user for several years now, is fucking anything else going to be left? I gave up AIM over a decade ago; I gave up Yahoo! a few years ago (when the Outlook.com preview came online); Microsoft ditched MSN; Google is ditching Talk. Seriously, what the fuck? The IM world is dropping compatibility like flies. What are these companies trying to do? Force us to just blow minutes talking on a phone, or dick around with a tiny screen and a god damn cell phone "keyboard"? I think it's safe to say that the state of instant messaging is truly fucked right about now.
Personally there are three products I use and think are important from Google
Ignore the poor use of "Do no evil" without showing evidence of the sucking the blood of virgins, or getting naked people to eat fruit.
The products that I think are important, are Chrome OS - Hell the desktop needs more love, Android for obvious reasons(900 Million activations). I'm not even mentioning maps...or gmail...or youtube...the list just goes on. Hell I actually their most game changing product is actually Google Apps for Business. I am going to ignore the Nexus range/Glass/Q/Driverless Car?. Search and Chrome are now just a small part of what they do.
You need to start paying attention to why Google continues to Grow, While Microsoft shares have been flat for forever, and Apple share have been dropping like a knife.
AIM 7.5 can link your Facebook and Google accounts and show them on the buddy list. Hopefully Google doesn't break the link, it actually works quite well if you like the AIM style interface.
Google fears Microsoft more than it feared Skype.
Google face *competition* from the pack of 4 "Facebook,Apple,Amazon,Netflix" but not Microsoft, Microsoft currently are struggling to compete effectively against Google, and nothing seems to be changing that. Ironically one of the many reasons (the main being its not that good) form Windows Phone spectacular failure is its insistence on skype, something that the carriers despise.
Page seems to think he can compete with Facebook by turning every Google user into a Google+ user, but they're a different audience. Just because he wants them to be the same type of people doesn't make them the same type.
I don't use FB, I think the people who do, are naive and have no idea how bad the loss of privacy is until they get kicked in the ass by it. I've seen a few, ex boyfriends problems, job problems, all kinds of problems and that's just the ones they find out about.
So Page is busy forcing people into Google+, and has linked all that juicy data together, the more he does that, the less I want to use Google, because I'm not a FB profile of user. Plus he gave Microsoft ammo in their fail-war.
MS has a monopoly on what today?
Desktop...Apps :)
I was using gtalk until about 5 months ago. Started hosting my own IRC server and my friends and family have all been using it. Its been great, only issue is windows clients are not the best and file sharing has been a pain.
Yeah, and with Mark Zuckerberg saying privacy is over, what could possibly go fucking wrong?
Sure, if you've got a protocol that can be cracked with concentrated effort and exploited, it's one thing, but this cosmic asshole is the one using pictures of your friends to fucking market things to you.. UNAUTHORIZED.. oh, I'm sorry.. maybe it was. Did you read the EULA completely? You did, didn't you? I work with attorneys all day long, and let me assure you, these cock suckers can engineer the most unreadable yet enforceable verbage you can imagine; they can write things that would put the most obfuscated C and x86 assembly language code to shame.
Fuck Facebook, fuck their chat protocol, and fuck you for even suggesting it. Take your six digit user ID and shove it up your ass.
Apparently google is quickly striving to catch up to AOL having not received the walled garden memo some 20 years ago.
Come on google... don't be stuck in the past.. throw away your crufty ole legacy support for POP3, IMAP and acceptance of SMTP messages from the few third party domains who dare not use gmail. It will be great.
Apple Discontinued Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_discontinued_by_Apple_Inc.
Microsoft Discontinues Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software
I'd never heard of it before this article. I think that's a large, possibly the largest, part of the problem...
When MSN fell, I had a raspberry pi, so I set up my own IRC server on it and have been using that ever since. If you don't want to go there to contact me, maybe you don't have to keep online contact with me.
Luckily we are in a computer science class, so everything computer related is not "what is easiest" but "what is most fun". Setting up a facebook is boring, setting up your own IRC server not so much.
Wait a second... Are you saying that all the people who don't realize that they themselves are the product sold by FB/G+ are the smart ones?
No I was referring to the fact that the individual, does not understand the fact that just because Hangout exists does not understand why email is suddenly not in existence.
If you think you are *sold* Google+ you are not really smart. Google whatever you think of it makes billions by *selling targetted advertising space* if it sold and user data its business model...and the billions would vanish overnight.
Facebook has different policies...and more worrying unscrupulous partners, who have there own large cashes of data. Without having alternative revenue streams. They are very different beasts.
While e-mail is not to be considered secure...
Let me stop you there...Did email break...cannot there be alternative methods of doing things...what is the difference to the two methods...are there advantages/disadvantages of the the two methods,...should more than one service exist.
People want to share photos...Google+ recently did cool things from autogenerating panoramas, creating animated gifs, auto improving photos, autotagging perhaps sharing through that platform is a good idea, but the reality is you can still use email...that never went away.
What is hilarious is Yahoo and Microsoft and Facebook have all spent big money getting into picture sharing because it is so *big* either acquiring companies for billions.
This is why you have no friends to talk to.
It is not possible that Google doesn't fear MS. I'd be willing to be that most of the people reading our comments here are doing so from a Windows computer.
I think its the fact that that Android Activations are set to eclipse those of Windows installs this year, and that is without any serious investment in Chrome...or Microsoft replacing a the Windows Desktop...with a windowless on.
But... how many of those are actual users, or just people who created a google account because it's required to activate their phone?
You don't need Google+ to activate your Android Phone...In fact you can use hangouts, by just installing it on your iPhone (rolls eyes)
The thing I most care about is if the "hangout protocol" will be supported by libpurple, preferably by google written code. It would be great if the protocol was open source to ease the implementation.
I don't mind having a variety of IM protocols because it adds fault tolerance, but I want to run only one client. Several clients use libpurple now so it is even resistant to one development team's idea of what is the next best GUI idea.
That's it, I'm just going to go back to talk....not Gtalk, just talk.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
The "don't be evil" has left the building. Cue evil Googlers to mod this into oblivion.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
At one moment in time, it was a really good way to get a hold of a high school or college kid (nephew, neice, cousin, whatever). Now it's SMS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I've been using freetalk since xmpp was dropped (its scriptable).
Maybe this will give me the motivation to stop channeling my instant messaging through google servers.
Thank you for illustrating so vividly why we would want to stay away from Google+. You couldn't have underlined it more eloquently.
I'm not going to fall for that tactic again. Next week you asshats will drop support for this new service too I bet. Even Microsoft is smarter than that.
tuppe666 is posting nearly 10% of responses on defending Google, telling you're not getting paid! cha-ching
Google is only open when it makes good business sense to do so, else they are becoming less open by the day. And more wealthy.
Relax, folks. Yes, XMPP may be dropped. But not to go completely closed-specs. According to a Google engineer, Hangout specifications for interoperability will come back, so third party apps can fully support it. XMPP needs to go because it is not extensible enough for the features needed. Besides, Hangout is nased partially on XMPP. More details here: http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/07/hangouts-mailbag.html
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced it was adding Google Talk support to its Outlook.com email service. That addition did not sit well with Google's CEO Larry Page. During a Q&A session with people who attended the Google I/O keynote today, Page expressed his feelings on Microsoft's move in the context of promoting open standards for software.
When asked by a keynote attendee from Mozilla about the future of web technology, Page said Google has invested a lot of time supporting open standards and said he was "personally quite sad" about how the industry has dealt with those standards. He then brought up the fact that Microsoft added Google Talk support for Outlook.com, stating that Microsoft was "... inter-operating with us but not doing the reverse, which is really sad. That not the way to make progress. You need to actually have inter-operation, not just people milking off one company for their own benefit." He also described Microsoft's activities as "milking off" of Google's innovations.
http://www.neowin.net/news/larry-page-microsoft-putting-google-talk-in-outlookcom-is-sad/
And we're *still* fighting *chat*wars? Bloody hell. You'd think the big boys would have found something better by now.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
uhm, email is never private. If you're worried about privacy why would you email a picture then? Anyone can look at your email when it's sent through the internet unless you encrypt it.
i much preferred talk over hangouts always.
I guess they won't publish that Google Pay is also canceled, after screwing thousands of small businesses.
Meanwhile, IRC works just fine... and is supported by Pidgin from what I can recall.
Pretty soon they'll drop HTML support
One word. "Apps."
* Google Wave: RIP August 2010
* Google Code Search: RIP January 15, 2012
* Google Reader: RIP March 13, 2013
* Google Talk: RIP ?
Action speak louder than words..
I'm using Google Talk with a 3rd party client (Miranda) - configured to connect using my gmail.com account to talk.google.com using a Jabber connection - to talk to friends that are using web interface at gmail.com. Is that going to stop working? (it does work at the moment)
I have a 13 year old ICQ account.. still works great. Same as 13 years ago.
Not very popular with 'common people' though, but I noticed.. nothing except facebook on desktop and line/whatsapp on mobile for chat, is very popular with common people.
Is still IRC. Screw GTalk, AIM, Skype and all the rest.
not unlike TV.
Sorry the product is the service, and your right its exactly like the a TV *show*, they *sell* advertising space(the product) in that service. Everybody know it, You don't pay in any sort of form, if you did you did the government would tax you on it. In fact you are the *consumer*. Its why google apps for buisness is now a paid service :) they dimply *monetise* the product in a different way...like buying a DVD.
Question: you need to have a google+ account (as all google accounts are google+ accounts) to activate an android device with google.
NO that is not true
I have no use for an instant messaging system that I can't use from dedicated third party instant messaging software.
Ironically, it seems the only remaining large XMPP provider is Facebook.
tuppe666 is posting nearly 10% of responses on defending Google, telling you're not getting paid! cha-ching
People who are paid, are incredibly easy to spot. The purpose is not to argue, or discuss...flame or win...spell correctly and don't swear. Its to convince *the Public* that your product is better...mainly by criticising the other. You expect phrases showing how often you use it "As a long time X User" or "I Use X everyday" "convinced others to use it"(the shame) Then you go on with with your you tried hard to like it and "you are reaching the end"/ "Just lately I have struggled" "Its my third version" then there is the vague nondescript complaint like its "slow" "buggy" "crashes all the time" "privacy" and my personal favourite "incompatible" and then the money shot *THE GUILTY CONFESSION* "I have notice how nice X it on a friends computer" "I have tried X out on a trial(seriously kill me) machine" "I borrowed X for a while"...and you don't actually switch because of some personality quirk defect "your too old" "fanatical about" or your a "geek"/"nerd" depending on your audience or a more brave "It does not work anymore" without providing proof or solid evidence...you can even spot them in this thread.
So after removing my MSN account from Pidgin, I can now remove my Google Talk account? Great, so only a private Jabber server remains. Unless I'm willing to have 3 separate IM clients running ... Bah. Anyone knows of a universal Linux client that can handle at least skype and jabber?
Although funny, that's not actually such a stretch. They've been embracing and extending both the content side (O3D) and the protocol side (SPDY) of the Web.
The only part of Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" that they don't do is "extinguish", although their equivalent of it is even more effective --- "implement our extensions or lose our free apps" --- so in practice they're extinguishing the pre-Google version of the Web. And they're much fleeter of foot than MS ever was, so it's working.
It's pretty clear now that Google's goal isn't to be the biggest player on the Web, but to totally control what the Web does and how it does it, to own the standards by an unstoppable de facto process. In many ways that's worse than Microsoft ever was, because MS was easy to fight since it made really retarded corporate decisions, even illegal ones. Google is much more clever and uses greed as its hook, and that makes it much more dangerous.
Well, ICQ still works. I've used it since 1999 and don't intend to move anytime soon.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
keep doing this google... and you will learn the hard way!
google keep axing service and features, they only work by statistics (what 90% of the people use stays, what doesnt reach that level is set to die... unless is related to google+)
If they keep stripping their services and removing things, even if is little used, make their service dull and boring and other service for other entities with shiny features look a lot more attractive.
They are not removing dead or broken features, they are removing things people use and like... even if its just 5% of the people, that is still millions of (soon unhappy) users
google should know this, a service looks better when it have interesting features, even if little used! that is what makes people happy when the "search result is somewhat the same" compares with other services. XMPP talk, google reader, calendar caldav, block sites in search results, even the google cache are disappearing, along with other features... and what we will have in the end? another altavista? plain search, full of spam? a webmail like hotmail? instead of being number one, they are becoming just one more... and not because the others are getting better, google is getting worst.
at least cached version of search results was put back (still very hidden, but better than nothing). google was "forced" to put it back, the due users complains.. probably from internal users, as outside users are just ignored.
finally, with google axing things, people trust less and less in the google "cloud", as a feature/service today might be a lost feature tomorrow and a problem to be solved.
So every time google axes one service or feature, is putting just one more nail in its coffin.
i personally avoid being logged in google services, refuse to join google+ and started to also use other search engines too. If google keep worsening their service, it is easier to migrate to other services this way.
Higuita
That shitty Hangouts thing has never worked for me ONCE.
I have a perfectly fine install of the browser, every time, never works.
Screw them and screw Hangouts, Google+ and everything else.
I will not become part of your shit network either, Google.
I'd give anything to kill this new Google.
Old Google was far better than this horrible mess of a company now.
A company that cannot even monetize the simplest of things, so instead cancel them outright.
Yeah, Google is dead. Long live Newgle.
I'm starting to believe that I should cancel everything I have on/with Google and move it home.
I use(d) Google Talk a lot. I use(d) Google Reader a lot, especially the sharing feature.
I don't use Google Mail a lot, but I'll move that home as well now.
I never used Google Office (whatever it's called), but now I never will. Seriously.
And I think I'll try to switch search engine. Any tips? (Might as well get used to the search engine going away as well.)
Are there any talk-solutions I can take home?
Distributed, like mail? That I can get my friends to run?
If not, are there any talk solutions that doesn't seem to die the corporate death?
My default right now would be MSN, and I'm not too happy about that (and it probably has a limited lifespan as well, with Skype and all).
Go back to IRC like a boss. Be real again, stop drinking the coolaid and think for yourself.
What I haven't seen discussed is the effects of this decision on Google Apps users, in other words, (paying!) business users. With Google shuttering XMPP federation, you instantly lose the ability to communicate outside your organization (unless your customers/partners are also using google). As federated XMPP is much more heavily used in the business world, this drastically alters the value proposition of using Google Apps since you lose the very interoperability that used to be a selling point.
I'd love to see Google answer that particular question. All "enterprise IM" solutions out there are built on (federated!) XMPP. Even Microsoft's.
This isn't a theoretical question -- My last two employers used federated XMPP to communicate, both internally and with external clients/vendors.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Very evil.
We use it fairly often. You can paste logs and code, and it's easy enough
to say "I need 10 minutes to check this out". You don't get a sense of
emotional tone -- well, except for response delay.
Never in a million years did I think there would be a silver lining to switching to IBM's Sametime. For shame Google. Even facebook has XMPP.
Google continues the slide towards irrelevance.
You arn't, and that is not how active members are measured
This is getting ridiculous. I already use trillian because I'm sick of the balkanization of chat. I don't see why I need to load 50 different programs just to chat with different people. Now we're moving to systems where we can't even use 3rd party consolidators?
I don't care if they want to 'reinvent communication'. There are very excellent use cases for having plain old text chat, and they arn't going to go away just because Google wants to stick their fingers in their ears and go "lalalalala". And there are plenty of other chat systems that don't (yet) pull this crap.
SMS has one big advantage that all of these proprietary im services lack (and google seem to be moving away from)...
It's actually an interoperable standard. I can use any handset with a multitude of operators, or i can use many third party online sms gateways. Regardless of the client or provider i choose, i can still talk to all other users of SMS, and i don't need multiple different accounts and/or devices to talk to different people.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Spamfiltering, would allow you to safely check mail "when you have time to kill".
Alas, choosing Facebook means no spam filter will ever be available.
Indeed, I buy your 'less obstrusive' argument -that's the first one I find in favor of FB.
But, I fear it's an answer for the lazy ones: setting up a good spamfilter was long, involving training etc. Setting up FB is faster.
And because it is faster, and almost all young adopters are lazy, FB will *undoubtedly* destroy the idea of spam filter itself. A bit like Google groups destroyed Usenet.
Now why do I feel so old...
Herve S.
Don't leave XMPP: https://dukgo.com/blog/xmpp-services-at-duckduckgo
I would be ok with Google dropping XMPP inter communication with other open services but the fact that even JINGLE is going to be interrupted makes me frustrated. So, no more voice calls between Talk users and Hangouts users = big kaka.
n/t
I think it's time to drop Google as a service provider. I am now looking for a gmail replacement. Fortunately, my normal email address is a forwarding address hosted by a major tech industry user organization. IE, I will point my address to a new provider as soon as I select one, or I will host my own email server if necessary. Google has lost me, permanently because of this crap!
I'd be surprised if they were really completely dropping it. It probably has more to do with rush to market on latest features than some attempt to slam doors on people's feet. XMPP for voice really is not all that great, I've implemented it myself.
We've supported Googleifyed xmpp jingle in FreeSWITCH [http://www.freeeswitch.org] since 2006. Its never really looked like something that would scale since the signaling protocol was over an already high level transport designed for chat. XMPP offers one really good feature, you can reach users directly using a user@domain.com style address and there is no NAT or any other networking or lookup issues to reach that user. The downside is it won't scale due to the fact that xmpp servers are heavily rate limited and not designed at all for tons of messaging at heavy rates. So Google luckily had the best super cluster of xmpp services in town and that allowed them to build on that for the voice stuff but I bet it became clear to them quickly the challenges with trying to exponentially keep up.
I would gather more info and look for the whole story before passing judgement. If they have some goal to use some fancy new audio and video services, there is a chance they can focus on that first and make sure it scales and it should be trivial to gateway that back to xmpp for existing topology.
Coming from a telephony background, I am more concerned with the tunnel vision towards paradigm shift at any cost that threatens people who still use telephones from being disenfranchised by this attempt to reinvent communication too drastically too quickly. Balance is key when it comes to legacy vs new wave in communication technology.
My guess is that this is a direct response to Microsoft.
Google has been talking open-ness, and xmpp is part of that. Microsoft decided to connect messenger so that they could send messages to g-chat users, but didn't reciprocate in terms of allowing g-chat users to see messenger contacts. (I don't know the protocol, but I understand this is a valid use of an xmpp server, even if clearly parasitic).
Google have responded by shutting the whole thing down. 'Hey Microsoft -play nice, or we'll take our ball home'
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
This is why we decided not to integrate with any Google services or software. They throw shit over the wall and abandon it. They have a working service and change everything about it. They do this all the time. In fact, ditching XMPP after ten years represents a new dimension along which you can't trust them. Not only can't you trust the new shit to be around longer than 18 months, but now you can't trust anything under, apparently, 10 years stay around either.
Yeah. Integrate with Google's offerings.. I think not.
I'll continue to use my google account for chatting with people for now, but if they pull the plug on 3rd party clients such as bitlbee, I'm done with google. I'll either setup my own jabber server running XMPP, or just switch back completely to IRC.
I use google XMPP because it supports OTR. Allowing me to privately chat with others supporting this protocol. Removing XMPP will likely mean that all my chat messages are stored by google. I dont know what googles real intent is here, but it will force me to find a new chat service that supports OTR.
Ive been suspicious about google wanting to get rid of OTR, ever since they installed their own version of "OTR"... which isnt the secure version of OTR at all, but rather an optional client based instruction to not store logs. It really bothered me that Google would select the acroymn OTR for something that is definately not OTR. It seemed that they were trying to create brand confusion and lul average users into a sense of security that did not exist. My theory is that one reason Google is moving away from true XMPP is that they can get rid of all encrypted chat communication and can apply all of their demographic tools on every message we send.
Just not on Google or the Internet in particular. There are better places for that.