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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.

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What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.

WhatsApp is very much a social network

Then SMS is too, right?

SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.

No. Hard to do group threads. Not encrypted end to end (but WhatsApp is owned by FB so moot point).

Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.

SMS cannot do group chats in any meaningful way.

So no, at least SMS is not a social network.

I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.

It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.

They did try and tie into FB more in India with disastrous results, and had to backtrack hard

I used to think that, until I realised it's impossible (well difficult, and not officially supported) to export your messages from WhatsApp. That's pretty bullshit.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-save-your-chat...:

“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”

“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”

I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)

The full backup is unfortunately not accessible! I can’t think why they’ve done this, but it’s incredibly user hostile!

The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.

If you have an Android phone, you can extract the SQLite DB that contains all your WhatsApp messages. When I switched from Android to iOS I backed up my DB and still use it when I need to read an old conversation.

Because Facebook and Apple built closed networks that locked Talk (XMPP) out.

This is highly revisionist history: Google shut down XMPP after years of neglect, and they were still late to the party implementing things like video chat even within their proprietary network. There was one legitimate technical concern — XMPP complicates push notifications for mobile clients since you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active — but that didn't force them to neglect everything else, or to close out 3rd-party clients. Trying to build their own closed network did that.

> you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active

Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.

What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.

Note that I said “active” — if you're getting things like presence updates, you'd want to filter them to allow the client to avoid keeping the radio active and that wasn't built in to XMPP. It's definitely not an excuse given Google's level of resources — they could have had a very optimized Google Talk client and published a spec for third-party clients to use the same notifications framework so I don't consider this more than a speed bump.

This is already implemented in modern XMPP clients like Conversations. See https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html

That's why I don't think it was more than a fig leaf for Google's true reasons for closing up their chat network. That was during the period where they were axing anything trying out-Facebook Facebook and I wouldn't trust the stated rationale for any of those decisions.

It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.

In fact, Google already had a precursor to XEP-0352 called `google:queue`, but as I remember the stated reason for shutting down XMPP as being "spam"¹. Google apparently can't deal with spam in a federated communication system ...

¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....

Yeah, it’s sad. I can get not peering with the world but it’s not like they couldn’t do something like an open CA-style agreement to follow certain standards as a condition to peering. If they’d done that, they’d be in a much better position to ask governments to require federation with an open protocol.

Facebook Chat supported XMPP initially.

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