[Semaphor]

It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.

[darklajid]

GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle.

Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my roster. Google and XMPP is dead, in my world.

Facebook? Well, I don't care what protocol they use if it doesn't allow federation. That's just another silo and XMPP is just a random implementation detail. The next version of Facebook's chat might switch to something else -> Just like Hangout did.

[72deluxe]

My brother and I have avoided upgrading the Talk application on our mobiles and we can video call each other from it. I can call him from my Xoom too, which I also have upgraded to the latest Hangouts.

If I attempt to video call from a laptop to my brother (using the plugin you must install in Chrome etc.), he never gets notified and it states that he can't join the Hangout.

This makes the service useless.

Why is this broken? How do I fix it? Is there anyone here from Google that can help?

I remember using MSN in the olden days on a variety of platforms with joy and ease, yet as everyone states, all these new tiny platforms that compete makes it actually impossible to reliably send messages to anyone. I still use SMS for that.

Also, does anyone know if Hangouts on Android indicates if someone is online or offline yet?

[daveid]

I talk to friends who are still on Google's XMPP servers from Fastmail's XMPP server. It works. I think it works if their account was created when gTalk was still a thing. But yeah, I'm more worried about Google shutting off my friends every day.