It's a real shame, too, because XMPP had the potential to become the next HTTP o...

shmerl · on March 2, 2015

> Google was in a position to change all that when they adopted XMPP for Google Talk.

I'd add to that that if they considered XMPP inferior for whatever reason, they were in position to change it by opening up Hangouts like XMPP-next or whatever. They simply betrayed the whole effort.

iopq · on March 3, 2015

Exactly, if they wanted to propose XMPP 2.0 like they did with HTTP, they could have done so.

zanny · on March 3, 2015

They didn't want to fix IM, they wanted a captive audience using something that at the time required Google+.

That sounds like a familiar trend for so many Google properties in the last few years...

thisrod · on March 2, 2015

> Imagine if when visiting a website you had to remember whether or not it's HTTP, XYYZ, or FKME before typing the URL.

Old farts like me don't have to imagine it. In the mid 90s, gopher and nntp URLs were quite common. It wasn't a big deal.

> Imagine if all email addresses couldn't communicate with each other.

That used to be a massive problem, but Eric Allman solved it before my time.

shmerl · on March 3, 2015

> That used to be a massive problem, but Eric Allman solved it before my time.

Is there some good historic overview of this issue for e-mail?

thisrod · on March 3, 2015

This looks like a good start. You'll need to use the Wayback machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail#External_links

shmerl · on March 3, 2015

Thanks for the pointer!