
The new Google Hangouts will not support XMPP - moobirubi
Hello from Google!<p>You are the administrator for one or more Google App Engine applications that may be impacted by an upcoming new product release. Google will be releasing a new communications product called Hangouts which users may choose to use instead of Google Talk. The new service does not support XMPP.<p>As a result XMPP bots such as the App Engine XMPP service will not be able to communicate with users who adopt the new service. There are two ways to keep your App Engine XMPP service working for end users:<p>1) Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP. XMPP clients will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.<p>2) End users will be asked to opt-into the new service when it goes live. Note that the go-live date may vary for Google Apps domains. End users and google app domain administrators may choose not to opt into the new system. If they do not opt in they will remain on the current Talk client and there will be no change to their existing functionality, including being able to exchange messages with App Engine XMPP bots. Users who already opted in may toggle back to the old XMPP based chat clients in Gmail.<p>Note that the changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients, which will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.<p>If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don't hesitate to email us at app-engine-xmpp-questions@googlegroups.com.<p>Sincerely,<p>The Google App Engine Team<p>© 2013 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043<p>You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to Google Cloud Platform or your account.
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mtgx
Larry Page seemed very upset [1] that Microsoft is basically leeching off
their Gtalk contacts into Outlook, without returning the favor (with Skype I
assume), and he said he'd prefer if things weren't like this and everyone was
more open.

He didn't continue that idea, but I think he would've continued it with
"...but since nobody wants to do that, then we won't do it anymore either". So
they are probably responding in the same way they responded to the leeching of
Gmail contacts by Facebook a few years ago, by blocking that API, or in this
case replacing the XMPP protocol with a proprietary one. It's too bad it had
to come to this, though.

[1] - [http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334242/larry-page-to-
tech...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334242/larry-page-to-tech-world-
being-negative-is-not-how-we-make-progress)

~~~
yanw
Gtalk will still be available though.

"... which users _may_ choose to use instead of Google Talk."

~~~
mcintyre1994
I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google Talk to remain indefinitely
though - if you need XMPP you at least want an exit strategy if Hangouts isn't
suitable. It's quite telling that the Hangouts app on Android is called
"Hangouts (replaces Talk)" and takes Talk's URL in the play store.

~~~
yanw
In GTalk's case any XMPP client will do so an official app is almost
irrelevant in its case.

~~~
sp332
Right, but you still need Google's XMPP _server_ to support it.

~~~
yanw
It's still there.

~~~
ricardobeat
For now.

~~~
jlgreco
Despite the clear warning signs, I am willing to put money on people whinging
in a year or two when they shut down those servers, just like everyone got all
upset about Reader.

~~~
npsimons
And whining about shutting down Reader accomplished what, exactly?

~~~
jlgreco
Absolutely nothing of course. Didn't stop people from whining; people love to
whine on the internet.

------
andybak
Well done everyone.

Instant Messaging is now dead for me because all the people I used to chat
with are now fragmented across 4 or 5 different services. Aside from those who
gave up on IM for the same reason I now have to.

You've all literally killed IM. Well done.

~~~
AceJohnny2
XMPP/Jabber has the concept of Transports to address this very problem.

Sure, you usually get a common denominator of features between the various
networks, but presence and chat usually is enough.

~~~
est
You mean the transports that spams my buddy list with tons of inactive
contacts and duplicates?

------
ChikkaChiChi
I run two user accounts in Chrome during the day: One connected to my personal
use the other to Google Apps for Business. I use Chat for Google for both
(Adium sucks)

About an hour ago, the personal account had a changed icon, started looking
nicer, and is now called Hangouts. The Apps for business one stayed the same.

I've never been closer to being a fanboi than I was with Google, but this
seals it...I'm pissed. Closing off (yet another) service in favor of
proprietary protocols is not something a "Don't Be Evil" company does...in
fact it's why you have the motto in the first fucking place.

You could have made the change without breaking XMPP. This is just shitty all
the way around.

~~~
hamax
You're wrong on almost every point. "Don't Be Evil" is not Google's motto,
XMPP chat still works fine for my hangouts account and no, they couldn't do it
without breaking the XMPP.

I just hope they'll keep XMPP running for the chat. I'll stop using it the
second it'll stop working in bitlbee.

~~~
uniclaude
> "Don't Be Evil" is not Google's motto

Ahem. This[1] is close enough to a motto to make this part of your comment
irrelevant.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil>

------
zmmmmm
This is incredibly confusing. The sentences seem to alternate, between "Your
end users will be affected, you must do something" and "Your end users will
not be affected". Some of the sentences seem to imply this is isolated to
AppEngine ("Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP","the
changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients") and others
seem to imply that Hangouts is going to completely stop working with XMPP, if
not now, very soon.

Can anyone clarify if this actually impacts your average standalone XMPP
client, not connected with AppEngine, sending and receiving messages to Google
Talk users?

~~~
jmillikin
Standard XMPP clients still work. If you use Pidgin or Adium or other similar
clients, you can still send and receive messages to Google users regardless of
whether they're using Hangouts.

If you have an App Engine instance, and it uses the App Engine XMPP Service[1]
to send messages to people, then that will stop working for users who switch
to Hangouts.

[1] <https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp>

~~~
zmmmmm
Thanks - that would seem to make the title of this submission to HN quite
misleading (even if it is extracted directly from text of the source).

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gwillen
Something interesting is going on here. If you log in to Plus, you can use New
Hangouts _right now_. And they _do_ interoperate with XMPP users _right now_
-- I just tried it.

So does this mean the rollout is not complete, and what they rolled out as
Hangouts today is not what they'll ultimately roll out? Or does it mean -- as
I suspect -- that New Hangouts is XMPP under the hood, but they plan to flip
the 'interoperate' switch to 'off' once they think nobody will notice?

~~~
Hurdy
No, what it means is that 3rd party clients can still interoperate with
Hangouts. What does not work is XMPP the way app engine uses it.

~~~
makomk
Are you sure? From my reading, it's saying the exact opposite - XMPP clients
still connect to a seperate XMPP chat service that's compatible with the App
Engine XMPP support and completely seperate from Hangouts. The Verge also had
a chat with the head of that department and he said that Hangouts drops XMPP
support, apparently with no caveats about it still partially supporting XMPP:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4318830/inside-hangouts-
go...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4318830/inside-hangouts-googles-big-
fix-for-its-messaging-mess)

------
r00fus
Yay, the balkanization of chat. So much for babel/babble. Now you have
iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Hangouts, etc. etc.

The biggies will be the ones supported by large companies (ie, Skype,
iMessage, Hangouts).

So when will Amazon buy Viber or another smaller chat community?.

~~~
aspensmonster
So... we're back to the 90s? AIM and ICQ and YIM and MSN? I CAN'T WAIT.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Sadly, it means the same tech as in the 90s will win out, because it is TRULY
platform independent.

SMS. And as much as I hate to say it, iMessage has the best
support/transparency for it so far

------
liotier
_"Google Talk [..] was based on an old standard that predated the advent of
cloud computing"_ \- what an extremely poor justification... He is not even
trying to sound credible !

------
ig1
I'm amazed at people complaining about the fragmentation of IM clients and how
it's going to kill instant messaging.

IM has never been unified. In the mid-90s you had the war between AIM and ICQ,
then came along the IM clients from MSN, Yahoo and Excite. That's what led to
the rise of multi-protocol IM clients like Gaim, Jabber and IMVU and out of
that rose XMPP (one of 5 major "cross-compatibilty" IM standards).

Then you had a new generation of IM wars as desktop clients died out and were
replaced by browser chat like GTalk and Facebook Messenger. As the desktop IM
clients died, Skype pretty much absorbed their desktop users into their voice
chat platform.

But now web IM clients are being wiped out by a new generation of mobile IM
apps like WhatsApp, Vibber, etc.

IM has never been unified, and given it's track record, I doubt that's going
to change anytime soon.

~~~
X-Istence
Gtalk and Facebook messenger both used XMPP. XMPP is federated so it allowed
many people to easily communicate. Even MSN messenger got on board:

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx>

AIM also has limited XMPP support (although that is just from a quick Google
search, can't figure out if that is still the case).

Either way more and more clients and chat protocols were beginning to converge
onto a single standard, that allowed people to easily communicate across
different "domains". That is now going away.

~~~
clauretano
Microsoft Lync has an XMPP gateway role as well. Unfortunately, Lync Online
(Office 365) lacks this ability.

------
makomk
I think that, at this point, the only Google service that still supports
standard, interoperable APIs anymore is Gmail. All the other ones have been
discontinued or are in the process of being discontinued. I wonder how long
it'll be before Gmail gets closed off.

------
pixelcort
Considering that XMPP federation has been turned off for some time now, this
really only hurts users using XMPP clients.

I was wondering why my friends with non-Google Jabber IDs were never showing
up as online, and one day figured out federation was turned off.

This is as if a few months ago your email provider silently discarded emails
to and from other domains, and just today abandoned SMTP and IMAP.

The true failure happened way back when federation was abandoned, not today.

~~~
tuxracer
Federation was turned off temporarily to fix an exploit then turned back on. I
guess it's moot now.

~~~
dwdbah
Right - there was a lot of noise about federation being turned off, although
it never was.

1) Subscription requests to/from other domains were blocked.

2) Only for a short period (about a month, tops).

------
StavrosK
Ugh, and to think that the only thing needed to prevent this was one other
"big" IM provider using XMPP. If we didn't have to rely on a single point for
everything, and were, instead, more distributed, like email, then Google would
have found it much harder to cut federation off.

------
tarkin2
So,

1) Competitors use Google's APIs based on open standards for their own
advantage.

2) Google gets annoyed.

3) Google stops supporting open standards.

Well, that's my honeymoon with Google over.

It seems a naive mistake to have assume an enlarging Google would stay true to
their roots.

It's time for those roots to move. Onwards and upwards.

~~~
tarkin2
I'm reminded of the story about an angry RMS accosting some devs saying they
should be creating their own open APIs rather than using X company's closed
API.

It turns out Open Source's weird uncle was right again.

------
ajpatel
I need a client for Ubuntu then :(

~~~
secure
Just to clarify: If you think you need a client because you are currently
using an XMPP client with your gmail account, then you do NOT need to switch.
See bullet point 1 — XMPP _clients_ are still supported.

XMPP _federation_ is going away :(.

~~~
manicbovine
Google enthusiastically kills legacy and niche products. I'm making wild
guesses, but I don't think we'll have support for XMPP clients in the long
run.

------
subsystem
Oh, how I wish I was a Facebook employee today. Nothing like a good fight when
you have the upper hand and the other party is being a jerk.

------
thepacketrat
They're still supporting client-to-server XMPP, so third party apps can always
just connect as a client rather than doing federation.

------
kevinwmerritt
I wonder how long google talk will last in Outlook.com

------
weems
woah :(

------
bdowney
Yep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage
everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both
your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!

~~~
mjolk
So, what do you propose as a realistic alternative?

~~~
stock_toaster
<http://www.jabber.org/> maybe?

Or run your own xmpp service, if you are a business/company. I personally use
prosody. Works great.

~~~
akohlsmith
I think that's the entire issue. Those of us with our own xmpp servers can no
longer talk to hangouts because we have to have an account with google. s2s is
going away, and I really am not interested in creating yet another account on
some external system so I can chat with everyone on the non-federated system.

------
drivebyacct2
This seemed inevitable. This interface and backend is so inextricably tied to
Google+ and Google's new infrastructure. I'm very disappointed. Google's
services work well for me, they're well integrated, I love Android, but
Android is no longer the bastion of freedom and openness I'd hoped for.

I'll be very happy with Google Hangouts but I'm still waiting for the properly
federated chat that appeals to the masses.

~~~
takeda64
Well, the XMPP still works and is decentralized. Is also the biggest network.
If that is not enough for you then I'm afraid you won't find any other
alternative.

You can set up your own XMPP server or use one of tons of the public ones:
<http://xmpp.net/>

Edit: There's also jabber.org <http://www.jabber.org/> which probably will
operate as long as XMPP is still relevant.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Yeah, I (and tons of people, apparently) misunderstood the changes to XMPP.
They _are_ removing the federation however and that does affect interop with
their network.

------
yanw
Serious question: how practical is it to build something like Hangouts that is
meant to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber etc on top of XMPP? is it even
possible?

~~~
dwdbah
Sure. Much of the Google Talk video stuff was all designed for XMPP; they
actively took part in the standardization at times.

WhatsApp _is_ XMPP, fundamentally, in any case.

~~~
yanw
Why is it not utilized more widely then? foregoing for a minute that everyone
is cultivating their own gardens - what are the weaknesses of XMPP that would
make it so easily avoidable for most of these apps?

~~~
andor
It's definitely not the lack of features, since XMPP is extendable. I've heard
that the protocol is quite chatty and would cause power drain on phones. That
could probably be solved with a binary serialization alternative to XML,
though.

~~~
ralphm
While the use of XML in the protocol might be considered verbose, stream-level
compression from TLS quite makes up for that. With many contacts, the number
of presence stanzas might indeed drain the battery because the antenna will be
'up' quite a bit.

However, the XMPP community has been active in quantifying such issues and
providing solutions. The beginning of a document with background information
is available as <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html>. There are also
various opinions on the topic to be found online, like
<http://www.deepdarc.com/2008/02/14/mobile-xmpp/>, that, as you can see, dates
back half a decade already.

~~~
dwdbah
The only thing Google actually did fro mobile XMPP was google:queue, which
bunches together presence updates such that the antenna efficiency is improved
dramatically.

Facebook also have a private extension, as I understand things.

I should actually submit that extension - I wrote it up as a XEP ages back,
but various things have held it up.

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fakeer
With Google focussing on G+ like crazies(even though I don't know many people
who use this service) and seeing Hangout is almost fused in G+, this very much
looks like a _Google Reader_ waiting to happen for Google Talk.

------
seany
Am I the only one that's thinking that "backend" for this is actually whats
left of google wave?

