Thursday, September 4, 2014

O GTalk team, where were thou? (part II)

Four full years passed since my last post on GTalk. Unfortunately I can't say much good about Google Instant Messenger efforts. It looks they would like everybody to switch from XMPP-based GTalk to proprietary protocol of Hangouts.

We saw stop of XMPP federation, wholesale upgrade of GTalk clients to Hangouts, last GTalk for Windows have been released15 months ago. Next logical step is to stop supporting XMPP altogether. What a sad day that would be..

Of the handful biggest IM providers, none supports open protocol (besides Google/XMPP yet). With 19 billions valuations the market is huge, and one would expect the fierce competition to leave no rock unturned in attracting more users. Unfortunately commercial interests prevail here.

There never was better time for an established company to embrace open-protocol platform. May be there already is? Please post in comments.

PS. Whoever is still on XMPP/Jabber/GTalk platform, uses pidgin on ubuntu 14.04 amd64 and misses "message delivery confirmation" plugin - here is a bit of solace for you: pidgin-xmpp-receipts_0.6-1_amd64.deb