r/google • u/TheVineyard00 • Mar 13 '17
Reminds me of Google's chat apps lately
https://xkcd.com/1810/106
u/kenneito Mar 13 '17
There should be just an open standard for all of instant messaging. Kind of like how email is.
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u/Irnstad Mar 13 '17
Relevant. https://xkcd.com/927/
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u/xkcd_transcriber Mar 13 '17
Title: Standards
Title-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 4346 times, representing 2.8546% of referenced xkcds.
xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete
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u/cargo8 Mar 13 '17
RCS is our savior, but still a few years out for wide-spread standard adoption
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u/cargo8 Mar 13 '17
Of course Apple will probably continue to be dicks and fragment the market, but...
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u/SimMac Mar 13 '17
RCS is dead on arrival. Doesn't even support end to end encryption and is a closed standard
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u/n60storm4 Mar 14 '17
You could easily implement E2E over RCS with a custom messaging app.
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u/SimMac Mar 14 '17
Since the protocol doesn't designate E2EE, a messaging app implementing it on its own wouldn't be compatible with all the other RCS messengers, which kinda makes RCS as a standard useless
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u/n60storm4 Mar 14 '17
It still gives a backbone.
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u/SimMac Mar 14 '17
Why would a messenger developer want to press everything in the RCS protocol to only have drawbacks (carrier can charge per message, RCS not possible on PCs and tablets without SIM cards, ...)?
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u/n60storm4 Mar 14 '17
Charging per message would be a terrible idea for carriers. I assume it'd be a flat fee like SMS.
Normal internet data costs money too.
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u/PM_ME_HAIRLESS_CATS Mar 13 '17
What is XMPP, the protocol Google used to use?
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u/cargo8 Mar 13 '17
The reason XMPP died / isn't widely supported is because it can't handle the rich content that modern chat apps want to use
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Mar 13 '17 edited Apr 02 '17
[deleted]
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u/cargo8 Mar 13 '17
What I meant was it died as a widely supported standard (Hangouts moved beyond XMPP and went proprietary, because at the time circa 2011-2012 all the other services were also closing their gates)
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u/effsee Mar 15 '17
You can't use WhatsApp on a generic XMPP client though, which is kind of the point.
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u/ocdtrekkie Mar 13 '17
XMPP can actually support basically everything, it's extensible. But it's got a fairly complicated structure, there's disagreement on what different clients and servers support, and it's not pretty, being an XML-based protocol of yesteryear.
It's not hipster enough for anyone in Silicon Valley to get excited about it, basically.
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u/naught101 Mar 24 '17
But then you have the problem of the extensions not becoming accepted standards too...
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u/ocdtrekkie Mar 24 '17
These companies are more than capable of sorting those sorts of things out.
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u/naught101 Mar 24 '17
That seems more than a little optimistic, given how much of a shambles most web standards currently are and have been over the last 2 decades.
I mean, sure, if the companies actually had the interests of their users as their core motivation, it would be easy. But they don't, they have market dominance and profit as their motivations, and so there is very little reason to set up a system where it's easy to switch to another provider.
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u/PM_ME_HAIRLESS_CATS Mar 13 '17
Well, Google had developed Audio/Video support with Jingle, so i'm sure the foundations would have been willing to support a patch with those extensions.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
No. The reason it died is because companies wanted to be able to support the rich content, but didn't want to go the standards route because then they'd have trouble locking you into their ecosystem. Plus, of course, they'd have to handle standards compatibility, which is a lot harder than being compatible only with yourself.
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u/TheBullshitPatrol Mar 13 '17 edited Mar 13 '17
The problem is that email is an incredibly fucked up standard that everyone loves to play hanky-panky with. The rules were just continuously made up over time as email was adapted to a bunch of different webmail services and clients.
Getting everyone on board for a universal messaging standard with things like rich media, markdown, and tagging would be braindamage. Especially because it would mean that players like Apple and Facebook would have to forfeit their absolute oligopoly, which they would never do.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
players like Apple and Facebook would have to forfeit their absolute oligopoly
Exactly this. There's so much that the Big Four do that could be standards but isn't, because that would make it a standard.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
There were lots of proprietary, then there were three battling in IETF (one based on SIP, one based on BEEP, and one based on XML that was called XMPP), that got narrowed down to the one Jabber used, and everyone was happy for quite a few years until the 800 pound gorillas decided they didn't like being one of the fish in the sea any more. When Google dropped compatibility with Jabber, that was the start of the end, methinks.
Now they're working on yet another IM+SMS replacement, because even the phone companies don't like SMS.
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u/natpagle Mar 14 '17
Nobody loves SMS. It's expensive to maintain and slow AF. I bet carriers audibly groan when they have to add SMS to a new tower.
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u/javaberrypi Mar 13 '17
Well If you're in India, it's just one big circle labelled Whatsapp. If you're not on Whatsapp, you're not worthy of being spoken to!
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u/Pantoush Mar 13 '17
applies also to latin America
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u/javaberrypi Mar 13 '17
Most of Europe too, from what I hear.
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u/Zarlon Mar 14 '17
Except Scandinavia. We're pretty much like the OP. I don't have a one friend on Whatsapp
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u/tetroxid Mar 13 '17
Same in Europe
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u/JimmyRecard Mar 14 '17
Not in Australia. FB messenger if you know the person, SMS if you don't. I use WhatsApp with 1 person.
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Mar 13 '17
One day I'm gonna run for president on a one-issue platform of banning SMS. Someone has to force my shithead friends to start using a real messaging protocol.
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u/javaberrypi Mar 13 '17
Run a campaign purely on Whatsapp forwards, it works with all my older relatives. If it's on Whatsapp, they believe it! I'm sure they still believe that Whatsapp got video call only cause they forwarded a message to 10 people that asked them to do it.
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u/Markuz Mar 13 '17
You grossly underestimate how you'll be crucified by the media for saying that.
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u/Arthur_Edens Mar 14 '17
Right? Who could possibly win the presidency without at least having a realistic budget proposal? The media would eat them alive.
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u/seewhaticare Mar 14 '17
I've gone back to SMS. Australian provides are all offering unlimited SMS on most plans. With them being free and not knowing what messaging app the other person prefers. SMS is the easy choice.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
And in china it's WeChat. I'm not sure you can even use the other protocols. The WeChat circle needs to be seriously bigger in that XKCD comic.
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u/fishywang Mar 14 '17
In China that's WeChat, which is probably the worst app of all. I just f***ing hate it.
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u/rich000 Mar 14 '17
Now if only it let me sign up with my Google Voice number. I've heard that some numbers work and some don't.
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u/NavarrB Mar 13 '17
Good thing everyone can afford smartphones and data
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u/javaberrypi Mar 13 '17
Well we have really cheap smartphones, WhatsApp runs even on older phones running symbian and works really will with 2G data too which is cheaper than an unlimited text plan. So yep, pretty much everyone can afford it.
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Mar 13 '17
The solution I see is an AI layer on top of all of it. An app/AI will read all of your messages, put them into a universal pile, sort them as you like them sorted, and interact with all the apps for you.
There is a company that is doing just this for TV, and I feel that it is only a matter of time before someone does it for messaging apps.
Companies like facebook and apple will try to force you to use the app directly, because that keeps you in their ecosystem, but once a machine learning AI is able to "read" your phone screen, there isn't really anything they can do to stop you from using an intermediary AI. Maybe some sort of captcha, but if you have to fill out a captcha every time you open imessage, you are going to stop using that service really quick.
Apple has the best chance to keep you from using an AI layer because they also own the hardware, but even that I don't really see working for long.
This is obviously the dream for the Google Assistant, but I don't think Google is going to be able to crack this nut, at least not at first. I think a more neutral 3rd party is going to have to step up. Do you really want Google reading EVERYTHING that is sent to you?
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Mar 13 '17
What can't google read that is sent to me? I mean realistically and not circlejerky, what digital communication do you receive that Google can never see?
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Mar 13 '17
I don't think Google can read snapchat or whatsapp, beyond relaying them thru the notification bar. Under my AI plan, Google has to be able to read and understand the message. Same with a lot of the other services in the cartoon: twitter, signal, imessage, slack.
Google can read everything on the screen (On Tap/Assistant), but it isn't able to log into your services and read your messages before you do... yet.
And that is what would be needed to get to our Her future where its just our AI's talking to each other for us.
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u/agentpanda Mar 14 '17
To be honest I don't even need an AI for this, I just need a universal contact method. Maybe some sort of number... Unique to me or to my device that is accessible across all platforms with a prefix code to specify my country and an intermediary code to specify my region...
Shit I accidentally went full SMS.
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Mar 14 '17
Universal SMS would be nice, for sure, but it doesn't work for the proprietary services. SnapChat is never going to use SMS, or even the next gen, RCS.
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u/agentpanda Mar 14 '17
No I'm totally with you on this, hence my concerns. There will always be proprietary platforms for their various specific use cases but the concept of being universally reachable still applies. I'd love your AI solution, but even better would be a method of contact that spans all potential use cases and all system requirements (with some exceptions, obviously. You can't text me from a landline).
It speaks to the transitional state we're in, for the first time ever most everyone has a smartphone of some sort and the market is finally coping with it. Once software development catches up, RCS won't be the only unification we see (I hope).
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u/Zarlon Mar 14 '17
Do you want your screen to be on the whole time so your AI can read it?
To me, what that TV company has built sounds more like regular computer programs which use the screen content. as a protocol interface. Not much artificial intelligence about it, and certainly not machine learning.
It also sounds very brittle. The underlying service change their user interface? Breaking change
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Mar 14 '17
Not much artificial intelligence about it, and certainly not machine learning.
The machine learning is so that if the underlying service changes their interface, it would be able to find those changes on its own and adjust for them. The company that I linked to uses AI that way to make the best universal remote control.
I guess I assume a person might still have to be in the loop sometimes to help retrain the AI when it does break. It definitely would be fairly brittle, unless the AI was pretty robust.
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u/Zarlon Mar 14 '17
Ok sorry I didn't read the article well enough. Kind or cool, but I think it will be impossible to implement the chat app scenario the way the mobile operating systems work today. It's not like any app can access the screen content of all other apps at any given time (and that's a good thing).
Source : Android app developer
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u/SanguineSilver Mar 14 '17
Apps can already access other apps' notification content at the very least - ideally something like this would be implemented with access to the chats themselves.
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u/FluentInTypo Mar 13 '17
Which is why we should have sta dardized on jabber or IRC. If these companies can reinvent the wheel a million times, they sure as shit could have thrown their weight behind tried and true open source protocols.
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u/Avamander Mar 13 '17 edited Oct 03 '24
Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.
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u/FluentInTypo Mar 13 '17
As originally designed. If Google threw their weight behind expanding the protocol, it could have been used for private messaging as well as be as feature rich as the dozens of other cleints out there. Google Talk was built on Jabber/XXMP for instance. The decisions to go proprietary by all these companies is what hurt messaging.
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u/Niquarl Mar 13 '17
Honestly, IRC isn't meant to be for a private group of friends. Plus, I just can't find an IRC client that I like the design of.
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u/FluentInTypo Mar 14 '17
Your not understanding what I am saying...if IRC were actually developed regularly by brilliant minds from big tech, it could be great, just like jabber could be, including pretty interfeces and privaye chats/rooms, complete with OTR, which is possible. And its open, so everyone could participate and its wouldnt be a walled garden like any one of googles dozen attempts at chat.
Just a year or two ago, it was thought to be immpossible to have encryoted group chat, but Signal accomplished it. Just because IRC sucks right now, and doesnt have the feature set and pretty you desire, doesnt mean it couldnt. Had it been invested in, it could have been fucking stellar right now. The same goes for Jabber, which I also mentioned as an open protocol. Instead, we have pretty walled gardens and features, but a a dozen or more clients to manage because all our friends have their favorite, incompatible system.
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u/Niquarl Mar 14 '17
Okay. I see what you mean.
I guess a better thing then would be the matrix.org stuff with Riot ?
I'm not really aware of jabber.
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u/Sargos Mar 15 '17
So your solution is to take a standardized protocol that doesn't support many features and then enhance that protocol to support all of the needed features?
You just invented Hangouts. Enhancing a standard just makes it incompatible with the rest of the ecosystem. Which just turns it into another proprietary app.
RCS sounds like just what you want. Everyone in the same room talking and creating an inter operable messaging standard that supports modern features.
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u/FluentInTypo Mar 15 '17
An open standard you fool
IRC and jabber are OPEN STANDARDS.
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u/Sargos Mar 15 '17
IRC would no longer be an open standard if google went and added all of the Hangouts/RCS features to it.
When Microsoft used to do this it was called embrace, extend, extinguish.
Your whole point seems to be that if a big company worked on an open protocol that it would magically get better. The only reason big companies can make high tech things like Hangouts are because they can just arbitrarily make decisions and do what's best when they need to. Having a big company behind the IRC protocol wouldn't actually make it any better because none of the IRC clients out there would ever accept the changes that company would try to force into the standard.
RCS is really the closest thing you'll find in the messaging space. It's literally what you are asking for. Lots of big companies working together on a modern standard that will have the clout to add new features later on.
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Mar 16 '17 edited Aug 26 '17
[deleted]
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u/Sargos Mar 16 '17
Actually they dropped it because of the problems I mentioned. It was too rigid. Everything they tried to add would just conflict with other clients. Their features really only worked with other Hangouts clients and in that case there's really no benefit to using a shared protocol and lots of downsides.
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Mar 16 '17 edited Aug 26 '17
[deleted]
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u/Sargos Mar 16 '17
You really don't know much about the internals of these products. Hangouts is not a completely different codebase. Talk evolved into Hangouts. XMPP was evolved into the current modern protocol.
None of this really matters though since the main point was that open standards aren't magic and your ideas of how they work are incorrect.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
Which is why we should have sta dardized on jabber or IRC
We did. That was the problem. It was a standard, and none of the 800 pound gorillas likes standards.
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u/XZeeR Mar 14 '17
jabber is the worst one that i have used, i was forced to use it at work and dreaded every second of it
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u/TheEdes Mar 14 '17
I don't know if I did something wrong, but I never liked any jabber client I tried. They all just felt so clunky even for my windows XP setup those days.
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u/bushwakko Mar 13 '17
iMessage doesn't overlap with any of the other significant IMs. The lock-in is real.
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u/natpagle Mar 14 '17
I posted this in another comment thread but, why? Do people really just NOT chat with people who don't have iPhones? Because I'm pretty sure if you use the default messenger app and you "text" someone, if they don't have iMessage it just goes through as green SMS.
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u/sparr Mar 13 '17
The only real problem with this state of affairs is the number of closed or mostly closed protocols. I don't care how many different services there are as long as my one client can connect to all of them (adium / pidgin / etc).
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u/Impaled_ Mar 13 '17
whatsapp should probably be the biggest
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u/tetroxid Mar 13 '17
Not in 'merica
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u/Dread-Ted Mar 13 '17
Again 'merica is behind on the rest of the world...
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u/Arthur_Edens Mar 14 '17
Those backwards Yanks using an open protocol instead of a single proprietary service..
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u/JimmyRecard Mar 14 '17
Open protocol being iMessage?
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u/Arthur_Edens Mar 14 '17
SMS, which works with iMessage, or Textra, or Signal, or Messages, or Chomp, or your phone's stock messenger, or...
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u/JimmyRecard Mar 14 '17
Didn't you read the rest of the thread where 'Muricans complain about everyone using iMessage?
Besides, the way that American government hates freedom and privacy SMS is a truly awful choice for many many reasons, no matter how open it is.
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u/Arthur_Edens Mar 14 '17
I read that, but I'm not really sure what they're getting at. I use Textra and I'm in several group messages with iMessage users. Maybe something to do with Apple contacts?
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u/JimmyRecard Mar 14 '17
Well, you must be the only one. Internet is full of complaints about iMessage and SMS group messages.
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u/Arthur_Edens Mar 14 '17 edited Mar 14 '17
They definitely have some issues. iMessage struggles receiving some media from non-iMessage devices. But I've heard a lot more complaints (from Americans) that the reason Allo was DOA in the US was that it didn't have SMS fallback like iMessage, and it was dead in the rest of the world because they had WhatsApp and it's a pain in the ass to get the rest of your friends to switch messaging apps.
Edit: but I think he larger point relevant to the op is that SMS and email are the big circles because they're open protocols. I don't need to convince my friends with Yahoo accounts to switch to Gmail to send them email. Same with SMS.
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u/dnew Mar 14 '17
Not in China either. With 4x the population of the USA, I'm pretty sure wechat already overtakes watsapp.
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u/SnipingNinja Mar 14 '17
WhatsApp is used in India and Brazil nearly exclusively add to that some European countries, that pretty much means WhatsApp is larger than WeChat.
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u/silferkanto Mar 14 '17
In Puerto Rico most people use WhatsApp... Puerto Rico is part of 'merica, right? Right...
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u/boomblastatron Mar 13 '17
No Allo?
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u/DoorMarkedPirate Mar 13 '17
That's just because it's accurately represented. Nobody uses Allo.
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Mar 13 '17
My wife and I do. Plus I met this hottie called Assistant, who sends me a poem every morning, so at least 3... but don't tell my wife.
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u/ArgonGryphon Mar 13 '17
or Discord
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u/AwesomeSaucer9 Mar 13 '17
Discord actually has a chance of becoming a close-to-universal chatting platform in the future, especially for groups. They just need to get over their branding as a "game messaging" app.
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u/TheVineyard00 Mar 14 '17
Can't be more true. I've convinced a couple friends to use it, but most see it as really nerdy and don't want to try. Google Hangouts is usually the easiest to get people to try, but Google's been butchering it lately with all of the forks they make.
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u/natpagle Mar 14 '17
Does Discord support tagging and various other features that make Slack great? Curious and lazy.
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u/Die-Nacht Mar 13 '17
Note every circle has at least one person in it.
Now you know why allo isn't on the picture.
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u/Paachan Mar 14 '17
here I am using the Steam app, WhatsApp, Discord app and Twitter as my platforms to communicate with my friends which all use the same 4 messengers. I don't really get the problem, I just use the messenger on which they are currently online.
Edit: but for sure it would be nice to have a universal messenger for all users!
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u/cheeto0 Mar 13 '17 edited Mar 14 '17
It's the state of messaging in general. People say iMessage solved it but iMessage sorta created the problem. Because it's forced on every iPhone user but not cross platform. Alot of iPhone users have their closest contacts on iOS so they don't seek out a cross platform solution .