[dheera]

Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol.

I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger (e.g. tablet/laptop/desktop/TV).

I enjoy e-mail/FB/skype/et al.'s ability to freely switch devices, switch OSes and continue your conversations extremely smoothly without any barriers. I want information to move with me, not with a silly phone.

[Animats]

"I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol."

That's an workable idea. What's needed first is to improve the transmission speed of short emails. I was once considering writing a mail forwarder for servers that don't have mailboxes, one that would open an outbound SMTP connection to the destination host before closing the incoming SMTP connection. The message would be forwarded immediately and the status code passed back to the inbound SMTP connection before closing. No mail bounces, ever. This would be the normal case for single-address emails that aren't too big and aren't tagged as spam. It's not essential to do it this way, but a mail server should not delay a short message more than 1 second.

Next, IMAP servers need to implement NOTIFY per RFC 5645. [1] This provides a push notification back to any interested mail client that new mail is available.

Mail clients can then treat emails like message conversations. Maybe using the "colored bubble" display UI on mobile, as with texting. A useful informal standard could be that single-recipient subject-only emails or no-subject emails get that display treatment.

That gives us texting with attachments for images using existing infrastructure. It could kill off a few unnecessary messaging services.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5465

[X-Istence]

Too bad too many systems implement various delays in the mail protocol. Such as greylisting which would defeat your forward instantly :/

[rakoo]

Greylisting kicks in only the first time; once a "channel" has been established and the participants send messages back and forth they should be on each other's whitelist

[Animats]

Good project for someone: measure mail propagation delays through various services.

[NetOpWibby]

I love this idea, thanks for sharing.

[Animats]

This could work really well with minor fixes. There are additional "enhanced status codes" available for SMTP that aren't used much. IMAP servers could return a new status such as "2.2.5", with meaning "Delivered, recipient notified". That would indicate an active NOTIFY connection between IMAP client and server. That means the client is listening right now and will display the message.

With "forward while connection is open" mail forwarders, that code would be passed back to the originating SMTP sender, which can then display an indicator in the bubble that the message has made it all the way to the recipient's device.

Now it looks just like messaging, but works over email infrastructure.

[ohitsdom]

From the link: "Google is partnering with carriers and OEMs to offer a messaging client for Android that supports SMS, MMS, and RCS, and will be based on the universal profile. The client will be interoperable with any RCS-compliant client across any platform."

Wouldn't RCS deliver exactly what you're asking for?

[grahamburger]

Google Hangouts does this for SMS. You can send/receive real SMS from your Google Voice number from any connected device.

[dheera]

Yes, but Google Voice is only available in the US. I have my Google Voice number forwarding to my e-mail which is nice. Of course, just actually using e-mail would be preferable. With e-mail I have one permanent address that hasn't changed in 15 years, and won't change anytime soon. Hangouts+SMS seems more like a bridge to the pre-mobile-internet era to me, a time when people were identified by a location-dependent number instead of an nice, worldwide alphanumeric identifier.

Nevertheless, a lot of operators/countries either don't have or don't want to allow these kind of gateways, for whatever reason. A purely IP-based solution would get around these restrictions.

[crumpled]

"Yes, but Google Voice is only available in the US." It would be more true to say: Google Voice only provisions US phone numbers. I have used my google voice number to make and receive calls and SMS messages from other countries. You CAN use it worldwide, it's only TCP/IP data after all. Unfortunately, you can't count on MMS working if you send to a non-US carrier. But MMS is only good because of its de facto status, it's not the best option for any of its use cases.

[dheera]

At least now, Google only permits you to get a Voice number if you can prove you have another US number to forward to (they dial you to verify). Although I do have a US number, that's only because I happen to be working in the US right now; if I weren't I probably wouldn't.

Also a lot of apps in various other countries (notably China, because I'm familiar with it) do registrations via SMS, in which you need a +86 number in order to register, period. Smaller companies don't have the infrastructure to send international SMS verification numbers. Larger Chinese companies (e.g. Weibo, Wechat) permit registration with a US number, but they're larger companies who have servers in the US and infrastructure with US SMS gateways. So running around the world with a US number isn't always practical. If SMS is dethroned as a "de facto" communication method that everyone is expected to have, this might change. Other places besides China may also have a similar situation.

[grahamburger]

Ah that's true, apologies I forgot. Agreed that a pure IP solution would be ideal. There are some serious technical challenges to getting a true IP solution working well, esp with regards to security, privacy and scalability, but the real problem is encouraging mass adoption.

[profeta]

hangouts does everything BUT this.

The UI shows several user accounts that you have to keep switching. it is a total nightmare.

then, the worst offense, you have absolutely no idea if you send a message to someone, if it will go via hangouts http IM message or via SMS. you have zero control/feedback from the UI. The ONLY way to know, is to create contacts with just email address and others with just phone numbers. and even then, sometimes it will go via hangouts IM when you send to a phone number-only contact.

the separation between an app for first class SMS (and nothing else) and google voice (for google voice) was the right choice and it still works.

DO NOT pair gvoice to hangouts. you've been warned.

[grahamburger]

When I'm using it I have a drop down next to where I send the message that lets me select sms or hangouts that seems to work as expected. I can choose which number to send to or to send a hangout. Maybe it's been a while since you tried it? I vaguely remember having problems like that in the past.

I respect your opinion about separate apps for sms/messages, but I personally don't believe that was the right choice. I strongly prefer having one app to use over switching all the time.

[profeta]

nope. have to use it daily as my main number is gVoice. sadly.

no dropdown whatsoever. Also to dial via gvoice you need a hangouts dialer addon, and everytime you last selected sms on hagouts and select to dial with the dialer addon, it complains that the sms account can't dial.

it's a train wreak.

[rtkwe]

Google Voice w/ SMS in Hangouts might fit your use case. I've never tried it with multiple cellphone numbers so I can't say how well it handles that. It does send from your Google Voice number so in theory it should be able to deliver message sent to you to multiple devices and keep your sent messages in sync. I know my sent messages appear just fine in multiple phones and on the web interface.

Better it works pretty seamlessly for people not using it because it just appears to come from a regular phone number to them. They just have to have that number also entered in their phone. That's one of the major hurdles to having a good replacement for SMS is that if it doesn't integrate into normal SMS there's a friction if Alice doesn't have a phone that can use the fancy new SMS replacement that Bob and Carol are hooked on.

edit: I see someone beat me to this suggestion.

[stann]

Have you tried Telegram?

[dheera]

Hadn't heard about it. Just checked it out, and it looks interesting. Unfortunately, due to network effects and my social circle, 99% of the people I know pretty much only use either Wechat, Facebook, or e-mail, but I look forward to seeing something disrupt this space with something better, more functional, cross-platform, and multi-login.

It would be killer if Telegram could interoperate with at least 1 or 2 of the other services, which would allow it to ramp up adoption. Unfortunately Wechat is very insistent about not allowing 3rd-party applications to use their messaging protocol, and Facebook seems to have closed their XMPP interface as well. I would guess Whatsapp probably has the same attitude.

In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications which used to be able to put MSN/ICQ/AIM/QQ/Yahoo/Zephyr all on one interface. That seems impossible with the state of mobile apps now.

[hanniabu]

You can try what my friend did, he kept spamming our old whatsapp chat with invitations to telegram until we all switched. A few of us, me included, we very reluctant to switch and held out for a while saying that whatsapp is great. Once I downloaded telegram and gave it the time of day though, I turned to love it in the course of a day and now I can't even understand how anybody uses whatsapp anymore. I could go on and list all the reasons why it's better, but I think it's simpler just to say that it's better on every front and feature(except no wifi calling, yet), and even has more features to offer than whatsapp.

[gurrone]

I once thought we migrated most of the instant messaging world to Jabber. Now on the desktop side of things a lot of stuff switched to Hipchat, Slack, Skype and what else. On the mobile side of things we see WhatsApp, Threema, Telegram, Signal, Facebook with now some RCS thrown in between. Feels like we're back at the end of the 90s. And now fighting on two fronts for open networks. :( The only communication that stayed open all the time seems to be IRC and email.

[simoncion]

> In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications...

Given that -AFAIK- Signal documents its protocols, I expect that there will be Pidgin support for it not long after the Signal desktop client moves out of population-limited beta and is officially released.

But yeah. It's a goddamn crying shame that this new crop of devs have decided to not only reinvent Instant Messaging, but to do it in such a way that leaves us back in the same situation we were in in the 1990's. [0]

That wheel keeps turning and periodically crushes us all, I guess.

[0] Of course, one could do the very same thing that was done back in the 1990's and reverse engineer the new wave of chat protocols. We still possess general purpose computers that can be used to snatch the plaintext of conversations that they're a party to that are sent over encrypted channels.

[ValentineC]

While Telegram has wonderful UI/UX, their server code isn't open source, and replies from support have been spotty, at best.

I fear it could eventually become another closed garden.

[easytiger]

Has literally all the problems he mentioned.