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by zanny 3816 days ago
So you abandon open protocols, and then try to be yet another whatsapp / snapchat / hangouts / skype / whatever the hell.

Didn't we do this in the 90s? We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

And a decade later, the cycle repeats. Everyone walls up, tries to treat chat as this money pot, and I hope we can get back to open standards sooner rather than later. I'm sick and tired of not being able to talk to people easily and just resorting to email since thats the only common open protocol left people actually use.

1 comments

We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

I think you are misinformed.

AIM: Never supported XMPP

Yahoo: Never supported XMPP

MSN: Never supported XMPP

What happened was that someone wrote code to send messages between them all. However, you still needed accounts on each for it to work.

Source:

No service can talk to all services. This means in order to talk to contact X, you must have an account on the same service as contact X, or on any compatible service.

  If you have an account on AIM, ICQ, or MobileMe, you can chat with anybody who uses AIM, ICQ, MobileMe, or SMS.


  If you have an account on XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal, you can chat with anybody who uses XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal.

  In the official clients, MSN users can chat with Yahoo! users but this is not yet supported by Adium.


Some XMPP ("Jabber") servers (mostly private ones) allow chats with proprietary services such as AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! via a mechanism called "XMPP transports".

https://adium.im/help/pgs/Accounts-ListOfServices.html

I assume he was referring rather to Google and Facebook which both supported XMPP at some point.
That would be correct. Unfortunately the author appears to believe otherwise. I quote: We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.

I think the context is pretty clear.