11:56 pm, 23 Aug 05
google talk and jabber
Google Talk is (finally) out. Props to my roommate Chad on the UI work. I don't really use IM (I find it to be the combination the worst features of communication mediums: the inefficiency of typing coupled with the interruptions of a telephone on top of the incoherence of immediacy), but I still think it's an interesting project on a few levels. Of course, I can't talk about them. But we can talk about Jabber.
I like to think I'm friends with a bunch of IM developers, and I'm well aware of their opinions of Jabber. If you feel compelled to bitch at me, you may do so on this post. (Know in advance that I don't especially care, nor do I have any influence on this project. Nyah.)
But protocol snobbishness aside, it seems to me to be an obvious choice: it's not creating the n+1th protocol, you get built-in support from every interesting IM client, and you get library support (there are e.g., Ruby Jabber bindings, but not Ruby OSCAR). One good way to look at it is that it's the least bad of the possible options.
All this "client choice" talk surely reads like marketspeak from a company that doesn't have market share yet, but I also think that if you think about it, lock-in is relatively uninteresting to a company like Google (especially as compared to AOL and Y!), as we typically shine when our products can be compared head-to-head. (But again, I'd like to point you at my sidebar.)
For more reading: the discussion here is worth taking a look at.
I like to think I'm friends with a bunch of IM developers, and I'm well aware of their opinions of Jabber. If you feel compelled to bitch at me, you may do so on this post. (Know in advance that I don't especially care, nor do I have any influence on this project. Nyah.)
But protocol snobbishness aside, it seems to me to be an obvious choice: it's not creating the n+1th protocol, you get built-in support from every interesting IM client, and you get library support (there are e.g., Ruby Jabber bindings, but not Ruby OSCAR). One good way to look at it is that it's the least bad of the possible options.
All this "client choice" talk surely reads like marketspeak from a company that doesn't have market share yet, but I also think that if you think about it, lock-in is relatively uninteresting to a company like Google (especially as compared to AOL and Y!), as we typically shine when our products can be compared head-to-head. (But again, I'd like to point you at my sidebar.)
For more reading: the discussion here is worth taking a look at.
Jabber and stuff
I remember talking to some of the Jabber folks when they first implemented it, and I couldn't comprehend why they thought it was a good idea to write a server-side shim to talk N different protocols instead of just coming up with a decent client that talked those same N protocols. Multi-protocol clients are common now, like GAIM and Adium, so Jabber seems even more useless to me now.I use IM as a replacement for voice calls, because it's less intrusive and you can multi-task while doing it; yet it's still more immediate than email (asking "lunch?" over IM is going to get a faster response than mailing the same question with most people.) If I were a teenage girl in Japan, no doubt I'd be using text messages for this instead.
I use AIM because everyone uses AIM.
I used to use IRC because that was where all the channels were that contained people who could tell me how to fix my dumb Linux machine. But I fixed that a different way, so now I have no need for IRC any more.
Also, yay more Windows-only Google software. That's awesome.
The new Desktop Search however is totally awesome. I've hooked it up to my favorite Flickr, LJ, and other random RSS feeds and love how it integrates with so many other things. I'm also amazed at how small the app is... less than 2 megs! that's some fancy codin'!