Microsoft cuts Facebook Messenger, Google Talk from Outlook.com Microsoft is doubling down on Skype by killing integration with Google Talk and Facebook Messenger in Outlook.com. The software giant has begun emailing Outlook.com users, saying it is discontinuing support for Google and Facebook's chat apps in its free email service within the “next couple of weeks”. Microsoft blamed …
I'm thinking... friend-request by email, after which an auto-responder provides presence information (skype is <here>, hangouts is <here>, sip is <here>, lync is <here>, instagram is <here>....), including, "I'm about to change my email address to <this>, update your address-book/bookmarks."
Then you can have a central place to allocate "find me" rights, give different information to different people. It can be human-readable, machine readable. when IPv6 hits and you get permanent addresses, you don't have to have a domain-name of your own, you can still use an arbitrary email address to provide SIP, for example.
Time to write a new chat client! /jk
As much as it pains me to speak in favour of MS, Google *IS* being either stupid or arrogant in their abandonment of XMPP. The purpose of XMPP was to devise a standard/protocol for inter-service communication, but it seems Google doesn't want to cooperate with the rest of the world anymore. I guess when it comes to standards, Google have changed the punctuation on their old mantra. "Dont. Be Evil."
Let's hope they don't adopt the new chat UI from Skype 7.x - it's a strong "hall of shame" candidate. Hundreds of people upgrading from 6.x took the trouble to register for the Skype community forum to protest the latest UI changes. Despite asking for feedback, and receiving universally negative reactions, they are now on record as saying that they will not offer users any control over background colour (vital for accessibility) or a compact chat layout (the new "bubble" format takes about 50% more screen real-estate for the same content). If you enjoy long rants, take a look at: http://moteprime.org/article.php?id=59
XMPP has been around for a long time. Contrary to what some might have you believe, it was not invented by Google. In some ways, looking back now, Google's promotion of XMPP may actually have slowed development of competing products. It's what some might call "the Outlook effect".
Back at the dawn of the Internet there were a myriad of desktop e-mail clients. Microsoft's Outlook supplanted them all, first in enterprises, and later at home. The alternatives narrowed down to integrated clients in browsers like Netscape and Opera, and finally to Thunderbird and a few very small players. Why MS did what they did is a subject of debate (consolidation of user desktops around the Office suite, or just a cynical ploy to pull the rug out from under alternatives to MS's Exchange mail services).
Google's ditching of XMPP and move of its messaging to Hangouts was almost certainly a reaction Facebook's challenge to Google's share of the ad market. It may be that someone at Google also thought it might help cut off the development of alternative peer-to-peer services that folks might want to run for themselves.
If you look at the spec and review what those who developed it over the years said about it, you'll find that XMPP is first and foremost a protocol to support peer-to-peer communications without an intervening server, ultimately cutting out the man-in-the-middle server owner who would use their unique position to analyze the content flowing through the system. Add the support for serious end-to-end encryption that most open source XMPP clients like Pidgin and Jitsi provide, and you've basically neutered the surveillance capability of service hosts like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Microsoft has seen this for a long time, that's why Skype is still proprietary and even more server-centric than it was when they bought it. That's why MS Lync server was only tested with XMPP servers that either don't exist any more or have single-digit market share, like Gtalk and Cisco's Jabber. So it should be no surprise that MS has dropped XMPP service support in Outlook. The protocol is simply too much of a threat to MS's core principles to be allowed to continue.
Ironically, the exit of Google from the XMPP world actually seems to have resulted in more development of open source software software that uses XMPP. While these projects were previously overshadowed by Google's presence, they now seem to be on the rise. Converse.js in the Node ecosystem, Java-based Jitsi, Android ChatSecure and others have joined stalwarts like Pidgin on the client side. On the server side, in addition to long time players eJabberd and Prosody, there's Openfire, once a component of Jive's enterprise collaboration solution but now community driven project delivering a production ready XMPP server written in Java.
Hangouts, try not accidentally hitting the video call button ! You can't disable it either.
Facebook now own Whats App, was really good but another ad agency spying on what should be private communications.
Skype, Ms just following the pack and will eventually lock you in somehow.
Alternatives that work across platform and are easy to install ? I am all ears.
"The company cited Google’s move to Hangouts – which replaces Google Talk and doesn’t support the extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP), an open-source protocol used in Jabber."
Of course, Microsoft has used proprietary wire protocols rather gratuitously and extensively through their history (and would kind of whine when Google and Apple didn't hop to it quickly enough to support one, when it was in Microsoft's interest.) But, it's a bit worse on Google's part to switch FROM a standard protocol to non-standard (and won't even maintain XMPP for interoperability apparently.)
Why can't MS just finish integrating Skype in Outlook etc? Lync became Skype Business but never acquired inbound/outbound calling to telephones. If MS integrated proper inbound/outbound calls and a virtual switchboard with call transfer, they truly WOULD have a killer app situation and "Office365 with Skype" would become standard for all small-to-medium sized businesses. Even better if they integrated CRM with it too, so that when someone rang you their customer details would come up. How hard can this be?
Why can't MS just finish integrating Skype in Outlook etc? Lync became Skype Business but never acquired inbound/outbound calling to telephones.
I use Skype for Bidness to call out to normal telephone numbers (and receive calls as well) often. Maybe support is very new or your business hasn't ponied up for the right software.
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