Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users.
Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "XMPP was designed over a decade ago to provide a way for chat networks to interoperate, known as federation. Google Talk was the only major network to support federation, and after seven years, it’s evident that the rest of the industry is not moving to embrace this open system. If, at some point in the future, the industry shows interest, then we would then be open to discussions about developing an interface that's designed for modern needs." http://www.zdnet.com/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-me...
Calling this an anti-openness move seems a little backwards when Google was the only company supporting federation to begin with!
Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them. Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?
Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a user base (e.g., most Google Talk or Hangouts users) and is very commonly abused (by spammers or otherwise), it's not worth having in a product. It's simply not sensible to make a business decision to support something (open standard or otherwise) if the negative aspects far outweigh the positive ones.
Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Should we shame Firefox for exporting my bookmarks as HTML and not as OPML? Should I be mad at Facebook for not allowing me to export my Like information in APML format and instead providing it in Facebook Archive format? Of course not, that's silly. RDF is an open standard, but that doesn't mean websites should bring Dublin Core back.
I think open standards are things to be implemented if you want to interoperate with others. Google used to do that but doesn't want interop anymore. That hurted communities that used those open standards. I guess, that's a pretty valid reason to complain.
It all boils down to millennia-old issue that if business interests aren't aligned with minorities' demands, those are being ignored. Don't think this can be solved in reality.
> Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP?
Lost in time. Personally, I had complained. I heard the other rant, too. I had registered for an API token and set up personal XMPP-to-Twitter gateway. And then I got bored with all this stuff and just trashed it and gave up.
But, hey, is it really silly that I had complained and cursed them evil?
> Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them.
I'm surprised to hear a number that high, but regardless of what the number actually is, it certainly sucked for those people.
But remember the context: Google was looking to expand Talk into Hangouts, and XMPP would have needed a makeover to support that product evolution. If Google had extended XMPP unilaterally, they would have been accused of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Without other major players to co-design with, it didn't make a lot of sense to try pursuing a next-generation standard.
> Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?
That's kind of inflammatory.
Remember when Mozilla removed MNG support from Firefox despite having 700 votes on the bug? Remember when the Mozilla CEO responded to a status update on the bug by saying "stop adding new noxious gas to this bloated corpse of a bug"? Are those 700 people not "considered worthy to enjoy openness" either? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574
Organizations have to make trade-offs sometimes, and you can't please everybody all the time.
So, I'd guess, if there's was least 7k public servers in 2008, it won't be wrong to say "thousands."
http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2003-09-22.shtml - this one is old, much before the popularity peak, when XMPP was still called Jabber, and yet: "the JSF's estimate includes more than 4 million paying customers of Jabber, Inc.'s commercial software as well as an estimated 6 million users of open source and other commercial implementations of the Jabber/XMPP protocol"
So, I guess, "millions" isn't a wrong estimate, too.
I don't think that removing XMPP was evil/inappropriate, but I don't think MNG is really comparable, since Mozilla (really, Vlad Vukićević) went to a lot of effort to design, implement, and submit APNG for standardization as a simpler replacement. (Sadly, the PNG group didn't bite, and neither did anyone else, but there was a good faith effort.)
