![]() ![]() ![]() One argument goes that XMPP was overly complicated and heavy protocol poorly suited to the smartphone world that emerged a decade after the protocol was born. What good is a chat server on a federated network where almost all the users have left? Jabber is dead. Things went south as by 2015, both Google and Facebook removed support for XMPP moving back to 100% proprietary walled-garden chat.įast forward to today and even the hardcore among us who used Jabber since the early days have stopped using XMPP. Finally, Jabber was going mainstream! In 2010, Facebook chat also added support for XMPP federation, making millions upon millions more people available via XMPP Federation! There was huge excitement in the community in 2006 when Google announced that it’s up and coming Google Talk chat app would support XMPP federation. Google & Facebook support interoperability…or did they? Mainstream users, however, remained on the proprietary services. The technology worked rather well and many of the more tech savvy users of the internet started moving to this chat protocol, running their own servers for themselves or their communities. Jabber IDs looked exactly like email addresses. People registered on different servers could chat with each other. It looked a lot like email, anyone could run a chat server and hand out accounts. In my final year of high school, I became interested in a project called Jabber (and later acronym-ized as XMPP) to make an instant messaging protocol that promised us a world with what we would now call “federated” chat. The world very much resembled today’s messaging landscape with a half dozen or more apps on your computer and having to remember which person was on which network. ![]() In my community, the trend started with ICQ and quickly moved on to AOL instant messenger, but all the big platforms had their own version: Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, QQ etc. We would go home in the evenings after school or swim practice and “sign on” to one or more instant messaging services. In the late 1990s, when I was in high school, “instant messaging” was all the rage. ![]()
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