
No, it’s not the end of XMPP for Google Talk - ralphm
http://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for-google-talk/
======
lnanek2
This is a terrible, inaccurate article to link. Google Talk is going away, so
is irrelevant. Google has a big banner on pages about it that it is going
away. I don't even understand why the article talks about it so much and
mentions it can still be used inter-server without SSL. That's just silly and
clouding the issue. Google Talk is irrelevant to anyone now.

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.

~~~
shmerl
_> This is a terrible, inaccurate article to link. Google Talk is going away,
so is irrelevant._

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?

~~~
luxpir
> _When server to server encryption became mandatory on most XMPP servers,
> those contacts were simply cut off. Gone._

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

------
shmerl
_> However, since the Google Talk Service does not support server-to-server
encryption via TLS (something that was required by RFC 3920 in 2004), a number
of servers (including jabber.org) refuse to establish a connection since May
2014._

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.

~~~
uniformlyrandom
> I wonder why

Multi-tenancy, Subjects, and Subject Alternative Names would be my guess.

~~~
acdha
That wouldn't preclude enabling support for the common case where none of
those apply or, for slightly more work, requiring SNI.

------
zo1
If anyone is curious, here is a paste-bin of an email sent out by Google to
users that are stubborn and still logging in to Google Talk:

[http://pastebin.com/kjMWriAK](http://pastebin.com/kjMWriAK)

#Note, I am one of them.

~~~
kethinov
Thanks for sharing that.

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.

~~~
shepardrtc
Google Talk is a great, lightweight client that I've used for many, many
years. Google Hangouts is an obnoxious pain-in-the-ass that I stopped using
after a couple of days.

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.

~~~
zo1
Agreed... I just had a discussion with a coworker that recently switched over
to Hangouts from GoogleTalk. They came across weird/odd/non-standard behavior
whereby the chat windows "float" above everything, even after losing focus.
You have to actively "minimize" them in order for them to go away.

It's a mess.

------
mey
Ok, I just read the facts they list and state and I come away with a very
different perspective. XMPP for all but the most advanced end users is dead at
google. If they are using the protocol internally matters little if the user
experience and federation is broken.

~~~
kethinov
It's a real shame, too, because XMPP had the potential to become the next HTTP
or the next email.

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.

~~~
shmerl
_> Google was in a position to change all that when they adopted XMPP for
Google Talk._

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.

~~~
iopq
Exactly, if they wanted to propose XMPP 2.0 like they did with HTTP, they
could have done so.

~~~
zanny
They didn't want to fix IM, they wanted a captive audience using something
that at the time required Google+.

That sounds like a familiar trend for so many Google properties in the last
few years...

------
impostervt
I definitely preferred Google Talk to Google Hangouts - it was just simpler.
Now I have Pidgin hooked up and it works pretty good.

~~~
gtirloni
Only works if have got a Gmail account. I had been using Gtalk with a Google
account custom domain and that's gone. Took me a lot of time to realize my SVR
records were not the problem. I created a new account with Gmail and
everything works fine.

~~~
nagisa
Still works for me and my custom domain.

~~~
gtirloni
Is it an old account from before Google Hangouts? Mine was a new one after
that. I think I really understood what should be done but perhaps I missed a
step. In any case, creating a Gmail account "fixed" it.

------
johngalt
Everyone wants to take XMPP, but no one wants to give XMPP. The old Microsoft
model of embrace and extend. What could stop this sort of behavior?

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?

~~~
captainmuon
IMHO this should be a case for regulation (although you'll probably disagree,
with that username :-). Basically, if you run a service with more than, say, a
million users, you should be required (or strongly incentivized) to provide
federation to your competitors.

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.

~~~
iopq
No, it's the job of the users to use open standards. I try to use XMPP still
and encourage people to use with me. They're probably using Pidgin or a
similar multi-protocol chat software anyway SINCE EVERY CHAT PROTOCOL IS A
WALLED GARDEN.

------
JustSomeNobody
It's very sad that we've reverted back to proprietary messaging APIs.

------
uniformlyrandom
So it is not the end of XMPP - XMPP is just broken for the mainstream clients.

Maybe it is not the end, but it is the beginning of the end.

------
nextweek2
XMPP as a protocol is a deadend.

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.

~~~
jkire
I think users do care about things like being able to use different apps with
the same messaging service; non-techie friends of mine complain all the time
about how some service X has a great mobile app but a bad web app and how
service Y is the exact opposite. The problem with XMPP was it never really
seemed to spawn the cool apps that would get the attention of non-techies (for
whatever reason, but the fact you couldn't talk it natively from the browser
can't have helped).

(Then again, I'm not exactly unbiased given I work for
[http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org))

~~~
illicium
XMPP, as a standard, was too slow to adopt mobile, so the cool apps had to
invent their own messaging protocol (perhaps on top of XMPP) to get push
notifications and such.

~~~
takeda
All they had to do is release their protocol specification, kind of like they
did with SPDY.

It's quite obvious that when they started they were small compared to AIM,
MSN, YIM and others so they used XMPP to help gain traction, once they became
huge they dropped interoperability to lock users inside.

Do no evil my ass.

------
zx2c4
Actually, the issue is that Hangouts doesn't work with federated XMPP. This
means I can't talk to my @gmail.com friends from my own XMPP server. This is a
problem, which significantly breaks things.

------
wnevets
I hate the hangsout ui so much. Google voice and google talk are must easier
to read and use.

------
daemin
So gone are the days of being able to have one IM client for all of the
different protocols. It's going to be on the desktop the same as it is on the
phone, and we're all going to be running 4-5 different IM clients with all the
same features just to be able to talk to everyone.

------
stormbrew
I've been having increasing problems even having messages properly make it
through between XMPP and Hangouts clients lately. Sometimes I have to open up
hangouts on my phone so my gtalk messages actually go through to another user.

So I'm not sure it's clear that even the days of that interop aren't numbered
as well.

------
ikeboy
Could someone explain what this means for routers using google voice for voip
service like
[http://www.obihai.com/googlevoice](http://www.obihai.com/googlevoice)?

~~~
duskwuff
Nothing. Google Talk is an entirely separate service from Google Voice.

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.

[1]:
[http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/](http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/)

~~~
ikeboy
I'm asking because I remember people saying xmpp would stop a year ago and
obihai wouldn't work, which didn't happen. (example:
[http://blog.obihai.com/2013/10/important-message-about-
googl...](http://blog.obihai.com/2013/10/important-message-about-google-
voice.html)).

------
rererererere
No TLS, huh? [http://i.imgur.com/BsJYvOr.png](http://i.imgur.com/BsJYvOr.png)

~~~
xnyhps
That's the client to server encryption, which Google Talk has. Server to
server encryption is missing.

~~~
rererererere
Oh, thanks for the explanation.

