

Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app - mwmeyer
http://www.mwmeyer.com/blog/can-you-hear-me-now/

======
voltagex_
>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their
competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled
garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication.

Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all
of your friends online? The situation seems _worse_ now that it did in the
days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revision.

~~~
anonymoushn
It is worse. If you try to run an online IM aggregator like the Meebo of old,
Microsoft (Skype) will block your IPs and Blizzard (BNet chat) or Facebook
(WhatsApp) will sue you off the face of the earth.

What's more, many services in this category have recently gone from trying to
make the world better to trying to make it worse. eBuddy and imo.im shut down
their IM aggregators entirely to build their own private IM networks, which,
of course, are interoperable with nothing.

Disclaimer: I worked at imo.im

~~~
pzxc
I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had
been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I
received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to
review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on
my own what I might have done to get my account disabled.

The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (over gtalk XMPP) is
only used for this one thing -- Pidgin IM with my coworkers. 2 of my coworkers
google accounts they created for this purpose were also disabled on the same
day. When I created a new google account, it was disabled within an hour.

My normal personal google account I use for gmail, and my business google
account I use for google apps, still works without a hitch. The only thing I
can assume, is that Google no longer allows you to use them exclusively for
XMPP instant messaging - unless you use their google talk interface built into
gmail.

Especially frustrating because there is no way to tell if this is true. I'm
just taking a guess, because that's all I can do. If there's some other reason
my account might have been disabled, there's no way for me to find out. Now
I'm worried about the lifespan of my other google accounts. Don't really know
what to do, because Google won't give me any information about what I did
wrong. But it makes me afraid they might one day shut down my gmail account
also, without telling me why or giving me any means to find out why.

Some google products I like, and some I don't. I hate google+, for example.
But webmail is something I rely on, and until yesterday, gmail was such a
slick implementation that I had no reason to investigate using anything else.
Now I realize relying on a behemoth corp for something that's mission-critical
(to me) may no longer be acceptable.

It's ironic and a little bit weird (in a Twilight Zone kind of way), that
Google seems to be behaving more and more like the Microsoft of old, and yet
I'm watching the annual MS developer conference that's taking place this week
(channel9.msdn.com for the video), and the things they're doing -- git support
in team foundation server, universal apps built in JS that work on
pc/tablet/phone/xbox (and maybe ios/android soon through cooperation with
xamarin), open-sourcing the .net compiler, etc -- make them seem like more
like the google of a decade ago.

Creepy. I'm not sure how to react.

~~~
sillysaurus3
One possibility is that you and your coworkers are creating multiple google
accounts which are being used from the same IP (your work's IP)
simultaneously, and since there isn't any history (like email, search, etc) on
those accounts then you're setting off Google's spam detector.

Not a good situation. I agree that it sucks. But... well, honestly and
unfortunately, your best bet is to write a blog post about the injustice and
hope HN picks it up.

~~~
anonymoushn
This is a good idea. As far as I know, HN is Google's primary support channel.
I am looking forward to the post.

------
fenesiistvan
We already have open standards for unified communication: H.323 (old), XMPP
and SIP.

Also there are a lot of companies using and/or offering great software based
on these open protocols: check Asterisk
([http://www.asterisk.org/](http://www.asterisk.org/)) or Mizutech full stack
offer ([http://www.mizu-voip.com/](http://www.mizu-voip.com/)).

There is only one problem: When VoIP companies grows, all of them are
switching to (at least partially) proprietary protocols.

There is a big hype now around Twilio. However there were apps like that even
before solving the same problem. For example mizutech SIP webphone also has a
nice javascript API and it is completely SIP compatible (without the need to
use any third party obfuscating cloud service like in the case of Twilio. It
will just connect directly to any SIP server ...without the cloud hype).

It just seems that technology or open protocols doesn't matter too much. The
winner solution was and always will be the solution offered by the company
with better marketing.

~~~
icebraining
We have XMPP, but [http://op-co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/](http://op-
co.de/blog/posts/mobile_xmpp_in_2014/)

------
darklajid
Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding'
lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees
that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and
(artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious.

WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer:
Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are moving off of WhatsApp
and end up (back?) with Skype, Threema, Telegram, Hangout, Facebook. No, not
TextSecure. That's generally unknown all around me.

Out of these services I hate Skype, Hangout and Facebook with a passion. I
like the Telegram marketing, but I'm skeptical and .. probably won't ever use
it. Threema is the closed [1] thing I would consider, but even that is a
compromise I'm not going to make.

For a long time now I'm telling my friends to 'just email me, or call'. Yes, I
do use mail like IM all the time. It works, while all of the products above
don't - for my definition of 'works'.

edit: 1: I meant 'closest', but 'closed' is such a good typo in that case -
I'll leave it in. It's both.

~~~
philtar
There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant.

Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and
the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.

~~~
darklajid
My mail clients have push support.

Look, I'm not saying 'Use mail for IM' nor do I claim that this is ideal. I'm
saying that this is what I resort to because that's the _only_ thing that
works.

In my world, there _is_ no IM solution. I don't have the necessary clients -
or my friends don't. Or a subset of the people I want to reach are on a
different service (Friend A & B on Hangout, C is using WA or Threema). The IM
you talk about? It doesn't exist in my world and only therefor mail qualifies
as 'as good as possible, given the environment'.

And .. if that makes 'IM' less like (each * a new message)

* Hi.

* You there?

* What are you doing?

* What about a beer tonight?

and leads to

"Hey, want to have a beer tonight?"

(still 'instant', as in 'reaches me in seconds and reply might! be equally
fast) - all the better.

------
userbinator
It's odd that, despite there being an open protocol for realtime chat that is
over 25 years old, older than HTTP or HTML, I would guess that the majority of
the population hasn't heard of or used it. On the other hand, almost everyone
has heard of and uses email, which also dates from around the same time
period.

> A unified communication service would not only allow me to communicate
> easily on any device it makes sense to, it would also unify the 3 main
> communication formats into one platform: voice, video, and messaging.

The closest to that seems to be SIP and its related protocols, but they don't
seem all that popular for some reason.

~~~
pjc50
Which protocol are you referring to - IRC? talkd?

Voice and video are fundamentally different from messaging because they are
connection-orientated; I think it's a mistake to conflate the two.

SIP is actually pretty good when the firewall punching works. I suspect there
are enough cases when it doesn't for that to be a problem. And of course, if
it's hard to monetise then it's hard to advertise, hence the proprietary push.

~~~
userbinator
IRC.

I see how messaging doesn't need to be connection-oriented, but in many cases
it is (especially if you want near-realtime latency, and not "whenever the
next poll is".)

------
United857
Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the
Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could
only email, message and communicate members within each service.

Back to the future...

~~~
gcb0
And then on the 90s you had icq, aol, yahoo and another dozen instant
messagers. Then Google played the bait and switch with jabber support for
gtalk and came social networks and everyone having a sms phone in their
pockets and all that became irrelevant...

Did we just defined the instant messager life cycle in 10yrs?

~~~
Zash
All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again .. and again ..
and again ...

------
marcus_holmes
I just want to point out that our current internet is not http-based. It's ip-
based. The World Wide Web is http-based but that's not the same as the
Internet.

This would be nit-picking, except it's not. There _is_ a global unified
standard for communication. It's called the Internet Protocol (ip for short).
If we moved SMS messages off SMS and onto ip we have WhatsApp (or any other
superficially similar service). If you want to stop using SMS because it
doesn't work over ip, then there are a few dozen messaging apps that will run
on your phone and allow you to send and receive messages over ip. This, after
all, was the driver behind WhatsApp's growth: the data bandwidth involved in
sending a message is massively cheaper than SMS charges for the same message.

A single google search revealed a whole page allowing you to send and receive
SMS messages from iPad or desktop if that's the problem.

So, basically, as far as I can see it's not the networks preventing this. It's
the users. Stop sending SMS messages and urge all your friends to move to any
one of a dozen non-SMS message formats and you're done.

~~~
United857
You're confusing network layer standardization (IP) with the application layer
(HTTP, etc.)

~~~
marcus_holmes
elucidate... I'm pretty sure I'm clear on the difference there...

------
m_mueller
We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity:

0) Acknowledge there is a problem.

1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end
encryption for _ALL_ major OSes (Mobile + Desktop).

2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it
(without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising.

3)-5) Repeat for Voice.

6)-8) Repeat for Video.

Right now we're still at step 0) with TextSecure being the most promising at
reaching 1). Each subsequent step becomes less and less likely to succeed, so
I wouldn't bet any money that we have anything like that in the future. Maybe
if MS released Skype as Open Source (which doesn't seem so unlikely anymore
after yesterday's news).

~~~
pjc50
"open standards" pretty much equals "no business model", unfortunately - at
least for something end-user orientated like this.

~~~
m_mueller
I'm not sure about this - it could also be that the medium simply isn't mature
enough yet. I mean look at the international phone network - they somehow
managed to get everyone in the same boat - you don't need some special service
just because you want to call up Australia. Yes, they don't all have the same
standard, but at least they are interoperable.

Similarly, why do we need proprietary standard to charge money for a service?
As a consumer I don't care about whether a protocol is open or closed, instead
I care about a) what percentage of people here and abroad it can connect me to
and b) the reliability of their servers. Making it proprietary is just
detrimental to (a) in the long term while gaining the provider some mid term
benefits by shutting out competition.

------
Semaphor
It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP
(mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted
that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is
email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.

~~~
darklajid
GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle.

Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are
on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to
the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or
due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be
able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my
roster. Google and XMPP is dead, in my world.

Facebook? Well, I don't care what protocol they use if it doesn't allow
federation. That's just another silo and XMPP is just a random implementation
detail. The next version of Facebook's chat might switch to something else ->
Just like Hangout did.

~~~
72deluxe
My brother and I have avoided upgrading the Talk application on our mobiles
and we can video call each other from it. I can call him from my Xoom too,
which I also have upgraded to the latest Hangouts.

If I attempt to video call from a laptop to my brother (using the plugin you
must install in Chrome etc.), he never gets notified and it states that he
can't join the Hangout.

This makes the service useless.

Why is this broken? How do I fix it? Is there anyone here from Google that can
help?

I remember using MSN in the olden days on a variety of platforms with joy and
ease, yet as everyone states, all these new tiny platforms that compete makes
it actually impossible to reliably send messages to anyone. I still use SMS
for that.

Also, does anyone know if Hangouts on Android indicates if someone is online
or offline yet?

------
TrainedMonkey
If some line drawn in the sand preventing you from getting the app to talk to
your friend... Well, maybe you do not really want to talk to him all that
much. I personally could live without skype, google talk, and imessage.
However, because I got friends and family I do want to talk to, I just bite
the bullet and use them.

~~~
themoonbus
Exactly. And, you can still fallback to text, email, or a phone call...

~~~
rurounijones
As long as your friends are not the kind of people who organise their lives on
those services.

"Oh, you didn't know about the party? I told everyone on the whatsapp group
chat (that you are not a part of)".

When these walled-garden communication channels become the de facto way of
socialising then not being on them is a massive handicap. (As I know from my
friends moaning at me for not having whatsapp)

~~~
themoonbus
So should you be blaming the software, or your social circle?

------
dimfisch
How about the web as a communication platform? Check out awesometalk.com for
video, for example. No need to install anything, besides a compatible browser,
of course :)

------
jacoplane
Isn't this what WebRTC will fix?
[http://www.webrtc.org/](http://www.webrtc.org/)

~~~
dagingaa
No, not exactly. WebRTC has no concept of interoperability between services,
only between clients. You need a signalling server to communicate the initial
call between clients, and if you wish to connect clients across services, then
those two services would need to connect to each other in some way, which is
not detailed in the spec.

There are efforts to use SIP and XMPP for this, but that only solves the
WebRTC-part. If you want SIP-clients to interconnect, you need expensive
hardware/software to transcode the streams, and you loose the P2P-part. WebRTC
is not a golden cow of interoperability between services.

------
ASneakyFox
Some one get this guy an email account.

------
thyselius
Can I read this article? No, I'm on a smartphone :) (no mobile version of the
site)

~~~
unicornporn
This is not true exactly because there is a "core communications standard that
guarantees interoperability", which is what the article asks for.

------
alttab
I don't use apps. Does that make me a grandpa? I'm under 30. Too much coffee
for this guy.

The last paragraph is cool, and I can visualize a day when you just want to
contact someone async... or not in any medium and not have to worry about the
network. The rant was pointless though.

