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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2013-05-31 , 16:32
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#11
Scorpius, you're looking at the IM problem from the wrong side.

IM, like most other hot topics these days, is part of an ongoing war we fight to keep the internet free, decentralized and open for everybody (as it once was conceived - I don't know how old you are, I don't know if you can remember).


Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
If the BIG MAJORITY of "other people" are using closed protocols then open protocols are WORTHLESS, even if you don't like the idea.
In fact, it's the other way round. It's you who has to make a choice: If you see the big evil empire eat all alternatives alive, you cannot just stay neutral and do what seems most pragmatic. Like it or not, whatever you do has an influence on other people. Join the network of Skype, and it will grow because of all the contacts you may bring to it. You're part of it then.


Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
There's no point on creating an XMPP account in an unknown server if you can't chat with anybody you're interested in chatting to.
That's like saying: There's no point in running your own webserver on your own domain, because nobody will find you there. I occasionally interact with people, so I find ways to tell them my chat account - including the oh so obscure server I'm on.

Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
You won't convince your friends and family to move from whatever closed protocol they are using (Skype, WhatsApp, etc) to your open protocol because they would have the same problem: "Would I move just to chat with YOU? and what about the REST of the people I want to chat with?".
I'm not even trying to convince them to move away from Skype and WhatsApp etc. (except from telling them why I'm not there). I'm only inviting them to put my XMPP account on their list. Some do, some don't. Fine with me.
Computers and smartphones can connect to more than one IM account at a time, you know. They needn't delete their Skype account to chat with me.

Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
This big majority of people don't really care if WhatsApp is stealing their phonebooks or if Skype is listening to your conversations (that's absurd though). If you do care and don't use these protocols, then you'll be alone and nobody will chat with you. People is NOT moving to open IM protocols.
See, and I'm not interested in this "big majority of people". Why would I talk to them anyway? Who I care about are the people I know, my friends. Many of them share my level of education, some of them even understand my ideology and my objections against WhatApp, Skype etc. - So quite a few of them use XMPP to reach me. I'm not alone.
(For those who don't - well, you don't need to be everybody's buddy, right?)

Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
So the only solution to the IM problem is that a VERY BIG COMPANY (like Google) push an open IM protocol to the world and hopefully everybody would move to that.
The only solution is people using their brains.
 
benny1967's Avatar
benny1967 is offline benny1967
2013-05-31 , 16:45
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#12
Originally Posted by Fuzzillogic View Post
I often cite e-mail as an example; everyone has an e-mail account and knows you can use it to communicate with everybody else, regardless what service provider they have. And that you can change provider at will, without loosing the ability to contact your friends. And even to host it yourself, if you're inclined to do so. And that you can use any client you want. And that you can "log in" from as many devices or locations as you desire. Yet I'm met with total indifference when I tell them that XMPP provides the same benefits, including the *free* offers, including late Google Talk.

I'm quite stumped and at a lost at how much the general population just doesn't care.
E-Mail is, in fact, the perfect example in the context (another one is http, by the way). The reason why e-mail works the way it does and more recent open protocols failed to achieve the same level of popularity is that email dates back to a time when the internet wasn't dominated by greedy companies. Engineers found solutions for problems, and everyone agreed to follow the specifications.

These days, if the service is your product, you have to make it incompatible with existing standards or else everyone else will sell your stuff cheaper and faster than you can.

The general population doesn't care (my theory) because most of them simply aren't old enough to see the trend from open and interoperable to closed and incompatible.
My guess is that they sometimes think like "Oh, yeah, would be great if I could video-chat with my contacts from XX on YY, too... But that's probably too complicated, or else they would have invented it, right?" - without knowing that XX and YY are actively preventing them from contacting the other side.
 
shmerl is offline shmerl
2013-05-31 , 17:36
Posts: 1,298 | Thanked: 2,277 times | Joined on May 2011
#13
Actually in case of e-mail, they also prevented it. In the early days of the Internet, users of AOL could not send e-mails to the users of Compuserve and vice versa. It was the pressure from the users that forced these selfish companies to interoperate and broke the walls between e-mail servers.

Users of IM services could do the same. If users of Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, AIM and etc. would start pressuring their services with constant complaints - they could budge in fear of losing users. But for some reason people indeed don't care. Is it because e-mail was viewed as more essential and IM is viewed as something non critical? I don't really have a good answer.
Last edited by shmerl; 2013-06-02 at 01:57.
 
shmerl is offline shmerl
2013-05-31 , 17:42
Posts: 1,298 | Thanked: 2,277 times | Joined on May 2011
#14
By the way, Google gave up on XMPP with an excuse that other selfish companies didn't join the effort. But it's a very lame excuse. If they themselves gave up, what to do they expect form others. And their excuse sounds completely hypocritical, since they didn't open their Hangout protocol with which they intend to replace XMPP internally.
 
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Scorpius is offline Scorpius
2013-05-31 , 19:45
Posts: 1,396 | Thanked: 2,796 times | Joined on Sep 2010 @ Caracas, Venezuela
#15
Well it looks that I'm way different than you and I'm not surrounded by geeks (and I don't want to either).

I would like to see you telling to your 15 years old daughter to install whatever XMPP software you can buy for her iPhone and tell her that's what she's gonna use to talk to you.

Same for the wife. Same for the cool (not geek) friends. It's just absurd.

I'm not against open IM protocols, but I have to admit there is a STANDARD right now. The open email protocol is the standard for it and we should thank God it is, but the standard for IM right now is not XMPP. It must be Skype, or WhatsApp. Everybody I know has one of the two. I don't know anybody that is not a nerd that has an XMPP account, not I don't want to. I want to talk with MY family, with MY friends and they don't even know what XMPP is and don't care.

Do you want to change the world? Then spend a lot of money marketing XMPP. But since you need returns you'll end up closing a protocol and charging for it. It's the cycle of LIFE where MONEY is EVERYTHING.

Why do you think Google don't want anything to do with XMPP anymore?
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juiceme is offline juiceme
2013-05-31 , 20:22
Community Council | Posts: 4,920 | Thanked: 12,867 times | Joined on May 2012 @ Southerrn Finland
#16
I'm almost convinced that the problem with XMPP is the name, it's too difficult and frightening to joe public
You'd just need to call it Jabber and it would be a LOT more popular.

Skype, Whatsapp, those are pronaunciable names.
 
benny1967's Avatar
benny1967 is offline benny1967
2013-06-01 , 10:30
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#17
Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
I would like to see you telling to your 15 years old daughter to install whatever XMPP software you can buy for her iPhone and tell her that's what she's gonna use to talk to you.

Same for the wife. Same for the cool (not geek) friends. It's just absurd.
But it's not absurd to tell them to download and use WhatsApp?
It's absurd to ask them to register with jabber.ccc.de, but it's OK to ask them to register with skype.com?

I don't see any logic there.

Even if (for some reason) one of my friends or relatives doesn't want to (or is intellectually unable to) join the XMPP network, but is already on Skype... Why do you silently imply that I (plus probably everyone else) should join Skype then? From your point of view, is it OK to climb the wall in one direction, but it's not OK to climb the same wall in the other direction?

Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
I'm not against open IM protocols, but I have to admit there is a STANDARD right now. The open email protocol is the standard for it and we should thank God it is, but the standard for IM right now is not XMPP. It must be Skype, or WhatsApp.
That's exactly the point. Neither Skype not WhatsApp are standards. They're products. A standard is a documentation that ensures interoperability of a service across implementations. Just like XMPP.


Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
I want to talk with MY family, with MY friends and they don't even know what XMPP is and don't care.

Do you want to change the world? Then spend a lot of money marketing XMPP. But since you need returns you'll end up closing a protocol and charging for it. It's the cycle of LIFE where MONEY is EVERYTHING.
Well, funny enough, I do talk to my family and friends. The difference is: While you expect your friends to just leave you out in the cold in case you don't follow the peer pressure, mine are totally OK with the fact that I don't use products that aren't morally OK. Funny, isn't it? As I said before, some do have an XMPP-account now, others don't, both is fine with me. There's still email, various online communities, sms, phone calls, video calls, snail mail, pubs and restaurants,... it's not that you lose people if you don't surrender to WhatsApp.

No, I don't want to change the world. But I cannot actively support things which I know are plain wrong. It's like... I don't know... like you know that clothes by brand A are made under terrible conditions without respecting workers' rights, while clothes by brand B are made just nearby in a modern, clean factory than complies to all standards. Even if clothes by brand A were cheaper and looked better, I just couldn't buy them. (Even if I know that me not buying them won't change a thing in their factories.)

Life is not about taking the easiest route. It's about doing The Right Thing.

(Oh, and no, money isn't everything. You're poor if you really, honestly believe in this.)


Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
Why do you think Google don't want anything to do with XMPP anymore?
The question was why Google experimented with XMPP in the first place. There's nothing in it for them.
 
Fuzzillogic is offline Fuzzillogic
2013-06-01 , 12:45
Posts: 479 | Thanked: 1,284 times | Joined on Jan 2012 @ Enschede, The Netherlands
#18
Originally Posted by Scorpius View Post
I don't know anybody that is not a nerd that has an XMPP account
Apart from the fact that google talk AND whatsapp AND facebook AND imessenger use XMPP, which could have been perfectly able to communicate with each other.

I wonder what your limit is. How many different IM clients are you willing to install? How many human-unreadable privacy policies with obscure waivers are you willing to accept? How many devices are you willing NOT to be able to use, because there's no client for your IM network? How often are you willing to try to reach someone, only to find out he/she has left the account in favor for the next hipster platform?
 
anthonie is offline anthonie
2013-06-01 , 14:08
Posts: 1,048 | Thanked: 1,127 times | Joined on Jan 2010 @ Amsterdam
#19
Why is this thread in offtopic?
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zappAtom is offline zappAtom
2013-06-01 , 16:30
Posts: 104 | Thanked: 58 times | Joined on Dec 2011
#20
Thank you Fuzzillogic! It is this fact that makes all the arguments from Scorpius sound so incredibally stupid. He says...

The open email protocol is the standard for it and we should thank God it is, but the standard for IM right now is not XMPP. It must be Skype, or WhatsApp
...but sorry to be a bit rude! But this is complete BS! Just because companies force me in a limited world of thinking, the only logical solution is to think in limited ways, or?
Actually you are the sort of people Scorpius, who are the reason why we have such a messenger mess - to blind (or maybe technically not educated enough) to see that also Skype or Whatsapp or Viber or BBM or whatever won't be the new standard everyone uses....because even some of them might dissapear, you will still be forced to have 2-3 applications to be able to chat with everyone. Instead of asking your sheppard to open the gates (and make some pressure), and "eat the green gras on the open wide fields"...you would rather like to be in another sheppards herd if this herd would only be a big bigger.
 
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