
How Google pulled the plug on the public Jabber Network - sciurus
http://jabbermania.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-google-pulled-plug-on-public-jabber.html
======
jambo
I used to run my own XMPP server (OpenFire) and had my DNS SRV records
correctly set up so people could chat to me from gmail. I found that one major
source of pain was that Google Apps for Domains customers couldn't chat with
me. It only worked with gmail addresses.

Why? Because Google Apps for Domains customers hadn't configured their SRV
records for their domains. Why? Because for these Google customers, chat "just
worked" with all other Google Apps for Domains and Gmail addresses with no
configuration.

Google supported and used XMPP federation, but seemingly "embraced and
extended" it to make it "just work" within their network.

I stopped running my system when I couldn't chat with my clients and didn't
feel credible telling them they couldn't chat with me because their _working_
but misconfigured chat system was in fact misconfigured.

~~~
xentronium
> I found that one major source of pain was that Google Apps for Domains
> customers couldn't chat with me

I had exact same problem (set my own openfire server when google announced
changes to gtalk about a month ago), and it resolved itself after waiting for
several hours. Give it a try again sometime.

------
MattJ100
With all due respect to the author (whom I had the pleasure of meeting many
years ago at an XMPP summit), in my opinion most of the points in this post
are unfounded, and overly pessimistic.

There is still a public XMPP network, just as there would still be a public
network even if Google decided to put up walls around Gmail.

Google's decision was almost certainly about federation, and not about
technical flaws within the XMPP protocol itself. Google have never raised
issues of spam before, despite participating in the XMPP community in other
areas (they are a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation, even). Indeed in
my experience spam problems on XMPP have traditionally been very simple and
localized, there is to date no general spam problem on XMPP (yet...).

Attempts to solicit feedback from Google on the many proposed spam-prevention
mechanisms in XMPP failed, as did requests for information about the spam
problems they claimed to be seeing recently, nor the solutions they put in
place to prevent them.

To claims that XMPP doesn't scale - well, they have successfully run the
Google Talk service for the best part of a decade now. I really don't think
scalability is an issue, and they are still using (and expanding!) XMPP in
other areas that also require scale (Android, for example).

Finally, to say that WebRTC is replacing Jingle is just nonsense. WebRTC
requires external signalling to work, and Jingle, a signalling protocol by
nature, works just fine for this.

Google's decision is undoubtedly a step backwards for the open IM cause, but
the XMPP network is not at risk because of it. There are many users and
businesses who are simply not going to entrust their communications to a third
party, and many of those do want federation. This hasn't changed, Google can't
change it.

------
sneak
WhatsApp is also a walled-garden XMPP network, with many more actives than
Google Talk I'd bet.

Is all this 'net-rage just because they once supported s2s and now they don't?

The whole point of federation is so that people can do as they please. If
users want federation, they'll use providers that federate.

~~~
mdasen
I think we can all see how wonderful email is because of its interoperability
and many of us wish IM had that. When Google announced XMPP federation, it
felt like it could be the start of something better. It wasn't. Microsoft,
AOL, and Yahoo didn't play along and even big third parties that used XMPP
wanted to keep a walled-garden. But when Google kiled federation, it was a
blow (at least to me). It meant that it wasn't going to happen. As long as
Google was federating, there was that glimmer of hope that things might
change. Maybe some startup will be open and awesome and it will kick-off
change once people see how interoperability makes things great like email.
Maybe even Microsoft or Yahoo would switch and it would pressure others
creating a cascade. Today, even if Yahoo decided "open is the way to go for
IM," they don't have Google already there. There had always been the
possibility that someone big would join Google's openness. There isn't that
possibility now.

I don't think it's hard to argue that things that are universal are better in
a lot of circumstances. I can call anyone via phone number, I can email anyone
via their email address. It's awesome. With something like Skype, I can only
connect with Skype users. That's less great. Not only do I have to use Skype,
I have to convince others to use it as well. People have to buy into Skype.
When I switched to Gmail early on, it didn't matter if others didn't use
Gmail. If something new and great comes along in the IM space, it likely won't
get traction because of the network effects. I know that one can point to
counter-examples. That isn't the point. The point is that users should be able
to use and migrate to better services. The openness of email allowed Gmail to
thrive with a low cost of switching.

I don't blame Google for going closed, but it is sad. It extinguishes some of
the hope for something truly better. And it's sad when the champion of open
throws in the towel on it. I'm not trying to canonize Google, but they have
pushed for a decent amount of openness on the internet and when they've given
up on open IM, it's hard to imagine someone else (who is big and influential)
picking up the cause.

~~~
sneak
> When Google announced XMPP federation, it felt like it could be the start of
> something better. It wasn't. Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo didn't play along and
> even big third parties that used XMPP wanted to keep a walled-garden. But
> when Google kiled federation, it was a blow (at least to me). It meant that
> it wasn't going to happen.

Nobody's built the killer realtime messaging app yet. Skype is the closest we
have, and it sucks on the iPhone and has no web interface so it doesn't run on
ChromeOS.

WhatsApp doesn't work on tablets and requires a phone number as your primary
identity.

Facebook and Twitter DM have become large, but aren't there yet because they
don't do video/voice and don't federate (and at least in Twitter's case, don't
sync read/unread between devices). iMessage and FaceTime would be it, bar
none, if it worked on non-Apple hardware - if only from the bootstrap momentum
of every single iOS user.

There is opportunity here. If I wanted to be in the software development
business, I would solve this problem and eat WhatApp's lunch.

Ideally it'd be federated, but that's not a hard requirement. It just needs to
work perfectly on every device that every person sends and receives messages
from. That's not that hard these days, which is why it's baffling that
nobody's built it yet.

I have an inkling that Hangouts is attempting to become that thing. If indeed
that's their plan, they will easily crush Skype.

~~~
snuxoll
I've actually had an idea in the back of my head for an extensible JSON
IM/Presence system, maybe it's time to get to work on that.

XMPP was never really meant to be in my opinion, it had a bunch of great ideas
but it failed in implementation (choosing XML was a bad start).

~~~
sneak
[http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

Don't go down that path. Just write a library once to speak XMPP (or use an
existing one) and then don't ever think about XML again. But please don't
proliferate Yet Another Standard for a problem that was fully solved a decade
ago. (XMPP also has well-defined standard ways of extending on top of it.
Color inside the lines, not because they're good, but because it's worse to
draw new ones unique to you.)

~~~
snuxoll
Except you can't ever 'not think about XML' when using XMPP, especially when
working with it's "well-defined ways of extending on top of it" that
completely destroy any sanity that XML is supposed to provide. If you're using
XML without a sane schema you might as well be using some binary format
because it's about as easy to work with.

XML streams, are you kidding? Who thought that making an XML parser read a
mal-formed document (because it's never a complete document until the stream
ends!) was a good idea! You can't even use the standard XML parser in most
languages without separating out the individual responses in the stream, which
aren't delineated by anything sane like a newline, but instead by a closing
tag, meaning you get to sit and parse XML as it comes in, waiting for the
message to be closed (and lord help you if your code doesn't handle the
possibility that you'll get sent malformed data).

XMPP sucks, I'm sorry, it just does. XML is not the appropriate solution to
use for anything with a persistent stream, it's got shitty error recovery and
requires far too much work to parse correctly even when you can guarantee you
have a completely well formed document before you even start parsing it.

------
lukasb
In my dreams, there's an organization pushing for interoperability, open
standards, data freedom etc over the long term. If there were such an
organization, this would make an excellent case study in failure. Are there
any strategic interventions that could have rescued XMPP federation?

~~~
Spooky23
We're in the middle of this war between giant companies around the future of
collaboration. Google, Cisco, Microsoft, etc are aggressively building
marketshare for cloud services and telecom, but they're success will
eventually mean that they'll run out of new customers. So they need to steal
from each other.

For Microsoft, XMPP federation is a great way to contain Google and make
inroads on places that are Cisco IM/phone shops. In the long run, they want to
extend corporate email dominance to phone via Lync/Skype.

Google doesn't want to be a commodity. Hangouts is their secret sauce. What do
they gain by being open?

~~~
Nux
"Google doesn't want to be a commodity. Hangouts is their secret sauce. What
do they gain by being open?"

The support of many geeks worldwide (and subsequently their friends and
customers), just as it happened until recently when their "do no evil"
transformed in "screw you". Google (gmail, gtalk etc) would have never risen
to this level of popularity without them.

~~~
smith7018
Sadly, many "geeks" turn a blind eye whenever Google does something like this.
Google has them and it doesn't seem like either party truly cares about the
other's interest.

------
voidlogic
"There is no open IM network anymore"

Cyrptocat? IRC?

~~~
speeder
IRC is not a IM network, Cryptocat I dunno (I don't use it, I have only a
vague idea of what it is)

~~~
voidlogic
>I don't use it, I have only a vague idea of what it is

Really? [http://bit.ly/11ZLOps](http://bit.ly/11ZLOps)

