I actually like Hangouts in theory (GVoice/Skype/GChat in one!), but it's a bloated monster of an extension that absolutely should not run in-browser. Even on my relatively powerful computer, I disabled Hangouts in Gmail just to function. I don't understand why Google can't build something as lightweight and beautiful as Pidgin.
I started a new project and jabber would work great if I had multi-user video http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0272.html but ended up going with Slack instead.
Hangouts has been a poor-performance app from the beginning. It should be rewritten from scratch/replaced in my opinion.
I've said for years that instant messaging is a terrible hellscape of competing protocols, mostly proprietary.
Imagine if when visiting a website you had to remember whether or not it's HTTP, XYYZ, or FKME before typing the URL.
Imagine if all email addresses couldn't communicate with each other.
That's what IM is like today, and it's a terrible, terrible shame.
Google was in a position to change all that when they adopted XMPP for Google Talk.
If they stuck with federating, maybe things would be different now.
I'd add to that that if they considered XMPP inferior for whatever reason, they were in position to change it by opening up Hangouts like XMPP-next or whatever. They simply betrayed the whole effort.
Old farts like me don't have to imagine it. In the mid 90s, gopher and nntp URLs were quite common. It wasn't a big deal.
> Imagine if all email addresses couldn't communicate with each other.
That used to be a massive problem, but Eric Allman solved it before my time.
Yeah, that's the deadly deal breaker. Practically all servers make it mandatory now. Since Google blatantly refuse to support server to server encryption (I wonder why), all my contacts that use Google Talk are basically cut off. Goodbye Google, you became evil as soon as you decided not to open Hangouts protocol for everyone and broke XMPP federation for Google Talk.
Server to server encryption problem was reported to Google multiple times, but they used their usual stonewalling response to address it.
Multi-tenancy, Subjects, and Subject Alternative Names would be my guess.
Google Hangouts will only show Google+ people as someone you can message. Period. There are some vague little interop features left. You can login direct to Google servers and chat with a third party client, yes.
Google has officially said they will no longer support federation - so other companies Jabber servers and user accounts will not work with Hangout users. So of the two huge user side things everyone is talking about: choose non-Google clients and login directly to Google still has some support, choose non-Google account is going the way of the dodo very much so.
The article, I guess, only really cares about XMPP like caring about "do developers still use Java". The point it makes isn't really the end user sort of thing people are talking about. Google could still use XMPP internally and the article would be screaming yes, but it could be irrelevant to users if there's no interop anyway.
It's a valid article to link. Google Talk (federated based on open standards) is not going away - it's already gone (at least federation part). Hangouts is a closed non interoperable service, not based on open standards. Clear degradation for Google. However this article isn't saying anything new. Google degraded to that a while ago and I doubt there is any point in trying to convince them otherwise. They chose their degrading direction with a lame excuse from Eric Schmidt which sounded like "everyone else does it".
> Google Talk is irrelevant to anyone now.
That's bunk. I had many contacts (more than a half actually) who are Google users and with whom I could communicate before. When server to server encryption became mandatory on most XMPP servers, those contacts were simply cut off. Gone. And don't say it's irrelevant - it would be a royal pain asking all those people to register on another XMPP server, and I'm not interested in using Google one. So I simply had to stop communicating with them over IM. Do I need to say what I think about Google regarding it?
Same situation here. Would love to keep using the DDG XMPP servers for all IM. Sadly only 2 (two) contacts remain since the TLS clampdown last year. The account is still enabled in Pidgin/Finch (in tmux on rpi), hoping for some reversal in XMPP's fortunes!
Feel free to add me as a contact there: [this username]@dukgo.com
With Hangouts, you can message anyone with a Gmail address I think. Using Google+ is not a requirement now.
#Note, I am one of them.
The pain of all this would much greatly lessened if they would make a decent non-browser-based desktop client, or at least open up their server-side conversation history API to third party client development.
I just want something lightweight and not dependent on my browser. I use Chrome, but Hangouts just gets in the way. Google Talk does not.
Could standards be constructed in a way the punishes greedy 'compliance' while still providing enough benefit to keep implementations from simply ignoring standards all together?
So as a user you'd be able to connect from GTalk/Hangouts to Skype or Facebook chat. Going further, as a Facebook account owner you could follow people on twitter, and post to friends' walls if they use diaspora.
I guess this would break many "Silo" business models (after all, that's the purpose of such a regulation). But it would be good for competition, it would give smaller competitors a chance. And it would give the large players a strong incentive to be great "account providers". I wouldn't use Facebook (G+, Google Talk, ...) just because all my friends are there, but maybe because of their great privacy policy :-D or because they offer the best UI or some innovative features.
edit: A little more detail in case it isn't obvious: in some forums your bittorrent upload/download rate is monitored to prevent leeching.
An open message platform is a great idea but individuals don't care. They are happy with walled gardens and XMPP doesn't have a USP to convince them otherwise.
Sometimes you just have to admit defeat and move on.
(Then again, I'm not exactly unbiased given I work for http://matrix.org)
That being said, I wouldn't count on Google Voice continuing to exist long-term. It's not positioned as a major product on their site -- you have to click through to their complete product list [1] to even see it mentioned -- and it hasn't seen any major changes in a while now.
Others though who knows.
Maybe it is not the end, but it is the beginning of the end.
So I'm not sure it's clear that even the days of that interop aren't numbered as well.
