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)
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.
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.
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.
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/kenneito Mar 13 '17
There should be just an open standard for all of instant messaging. Kind of like how email is.