Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — asserting his control over the company’s sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandal.
The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time.
Before WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, I was quite glad my – and many other countries – had pretty much standardised on using WhatsApp as the nation’s messaging platform, instead of relying on platforms based on platform lock-in, such as iMessage.
These days, however, with WhatsApp being owned by Facebook and the company clearly looking at ways to profit off even end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms, I’m quite furstrated by the fact that I have nowhere else to go. Trying to get literally all your friends and family to move to another platform is like stubbornly trying to get your friends to speak Swahili to you by trying to speak nothing but Swahili to them. It’s rude and will just make people not want to talk to you.
All I can hope for is an organic change in how we communicate with one another, or some EU intervention to wrestle control over vital messaging platforms from corporations. I’m not holding my breath for either.
This is the point at which I’d traditionally make a big deal about promoting federated networks that don’t force us to subscribe to a specific service to be able to communicate with friends and family, but I just can’t anymore. I know it’s futile. None of these big companies that control communications and information are going to develop or embrace new federated standards anymore when it gives customers more choice to chose alternatives. Even though I’m willing to bet there are millions of people just like me who wish to boycott the likes of facebook, without the masses joining us, our cause is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 🙁
We can still do that: https://matrix.org/blog/home/
It’s trying to solve this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C61WN1TW0AEvoUt.jpg
By building this:
https://matrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/bridge2.jpg
In this way:
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/webrtcglobalsummitsummary2015-150426120401-conversion-gate01/95/webrtc-global-summit-summary-2015-8-638.jpg?cb=1430050998
With an open protocol:
https://matrix.org/docs/spec/
And you can connect back to existing networks with bridges:
https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridges
There is even a hosted service already (just like with email), but no bridges yet.
Lennie,
To me it’s just the next incarnation of trillian or pidgin. Sure it’s more refined, and it’s nice to move accounts to a server, but IMHO it’s still only making the best of a bad situation and it doesn’t actually free you from the 3rd party commercial services the way a federated network does. Yes, matrix is capable of being deployed in a self hosted environment to partake in actual federated networks, and I agree that has technical merit, but unless providers start to embrace it for the masses, then low market share may seal it’s fate, though I hope I’m wrong.
It’s still pretty new, so I’m giving it still some time to develop before passing judgement. It got all the basic technical design right.
But in the mean time it’s at least one way to solve the multiple networks/apps problem from the perspective of those using Matrix. 🙂
Lennie,
Yeah, that’s fair.
It’s just for me there are only so many rollercoaster rides you can go through while maintaining faith that this time things will be different. I think private corporate networks may be the end game due to power imbalances regardless of alternative technologies. This wasn’t always the case, around the 2000’s I used to think P2P technologies would win out over centralized ones.
Just use an old phone that stays at home and switch over your WhatsApp to that one if you think you really need it (which you don’t). If your contacts know you won’t answer until you choose to do so they will get used to that very quickly. (and real friends will keep in touch anyway)
In my case people know they better call on the fixed line and only after that on my mobile phone. Sending messages to me is something you should only do when it really isn’t urgent and life is good that way. No clear question that needs an answer is no message back mostly. I have Signal installed on my phone, but data is switched off all the time, so I’ll find out when there are new messages when connected to a wifi network. People who also use it know that, so no problems there.
I am the opposite… I rather text/message with my contacts. Being available (both of us at the same time) to talk on the phone which always ends up being 15 minutes at a minimum is a pain to me. Yes, my contacts are trained to not always expect an immediate response. Most conversations don’t need to be “private” so SMS is fine. The few conversations that need to be private (with some contacts) I do use Signal.
Landline? Data turned off on phone? That seems barbaric. LOL
And here’s me still with ICQ! Sod Farcebook, never used it, never will. 😉
Well, I want to use Signal. But whatsapp is so hard to ignore. And when I ask people to use Signal i get request to use Telegram or something else instead. Whatsapp is like a dictator which cannot be ignored. Too bad.
If that makes you less sad, Telegram isn’t even an option here in Brasil. The only friends that use it are techie ones.
WhatsApp is like a brain damage culture here. People buy smartphones and the first thing they install is WhatsApp. If you try to teach them there are options like Telegram, they dont take it seriously.
Our country even have a featurephone with dedicated “send whatsapp audio” key…
https://loja.meupositivo.com.br/celular-positivo-p70-256mb-2g-bluetooth-dual-chip-vga-24—preto
There is a window of opportunity: now the mobile operators are deploying RCS. If they can have it available when Facebook start spamming whatsapp accounts with business “promoted posts” or whatever they call them, then people will start using RCS. At least in my [european] country, Android is commanding more than 70% of the devices, so Apple not supporting RCS is not that important.
For geeks, there are a lots of alternatives. Perhaps Matrix.org is the better positioned one, as there are several open source projects using IRC or Matrix.org for chat (although Discord seems to have the upper hand there, followed by Telegram). The problem with Matrix is that it’s very young and seemingly unfinished; the official server is just a proof-of-concept in python, and although various server implementations are being developed by different groups, neither of them is finished (yet).
That said, I’m using Matrix.org for my IM needs (have it installed on the devices of “key” friends and family), and use plain old SMS with the rest of the world.
I wouldn’t fawn too much over RCS.
It’s made for carriers, not consumers.
As a modern, supposed replacement for SMS, it doesn’t even support end-to-end encryption – which is just irresponsible.
.
.
I get frustrated with all these messaging solutions too – WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, etc etc
I mean, in terms of feature set, IM was a solved problem in the 90’s with the likes of ICQ, EGN, and even MSN
.
With these modern ones, you can’t even do basic things like set your own status.
.
If I want to stop receiving Viber alerts, for example, there is no ‘Do not disturb’ mode or anything like it.
I could set my phone to silent – but I don’t wan’t to block all notifications; and even if I did that, I’d then have to manually mute viber on each of my PC’s too.
.
In terms of technology; IM was a solved problem circa 2004 – there is no need for matrix or any other newer technology – XMPP was designed to do it all.
I mean, there isn’t even a way for me to consistently (or at all!) back up or migrate my conversation history on the myriad of solutions out there today. It’s a digital black hole.
.
The problem is not technology – it’s corporate lock-in.
Certainly, the problem is vendor lock-in.
But the lack of solutions is a symptom that although IM was resolved, federated IM wasn’t (IRC had it, but didn’t cover the same space).
The only real contender in federated IM was XMPP, which supports everything you may want of a IM, but not without its own pitfalls. It is too verbose (XML), it is message centered instead of database centered (makes HA more difficult) and the myriad of extensions makes it both cumbersome to implement and problematic with implementation compatibility.
AFAIK, Matrix.org tries to solve those deficiencies (replication of the message history is trivial, it has a unique versioning of the protocol as a whole, reachable by standard HTTPS port), but it may bring others. For example: I haven’t followed its development lately, but there was the problem of the message content format. They could use HTML with all of its complexity or use a simpler but limited markup like markdown, or use both with text fallback… don’t know if that has been settled by now.
IMHO, having a universal IM fallback (RCS, with all its deficiencies) would be a real enabler of change. Without it, it is nearly impossible to displace the incumbent because of the network effects.
jmorgannz,
+1
You are exactly right. We don’t have a technology problem, what we have is selfish corporate interests deciding where technology goes. While I like to promote less-corporate alternatives, I won’t lie, it comes at the expense of not being able to reach friends and family who’ve embraced the private corporate networks and don’t care about things like vendor locking. Corporations have become extremely proficient at exploiting consumer apathy on a large scale to coerce the rest of us to give in too.
At least GoogleTalk/Hangouts (which is really Jabber/XMPP, though no longer federated unfortunatelly 🙁 ) archives chat history in Gmail …and luckily, all my friends use it.
Hm, and weren’t at least WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also based on Jabber/XMPP, anyway? Should be relatively straightforward to bring them together…
From what I hear that proof-of-concept server is doing is fine for pretty much everyone.
It’s the end2end encryption I would like to see finished and well integrated in all clients, etc.
Of course. I’m using it, and it certainly works.
The reasons I would love to have a native implementation (for my small VPS intallation) are:
– More choices for the database storage. Right now sqlite doesn’t scale, and Postgres (the recommended solution) is rather heavy for embedded scenarios.
– CPU spikes (frequently 10% of CPU in the small VPS)
– More efficient memory handling (100MB just started, memory consumption creeps as times goes by, but may be because of sqlite)
That said, I’m happy with it (and will try to squeeze postgres into that VPS…)
Good to hear it’s pretty much working for you (when you throw enough resources at it).
I wish to use Signal or Riot+Matrix, but realistically the only two practical alternatives to Whatsapp for me are Telegram and Viber.
I already have three quarters of my whatsapp contacts there, and I am trying to convince the remainder to installed Telegram or Viber so I can delete Whatsapp. I guess now it’s time to increase my efforts!
You should be able to use Riot+Matrix and connect with all the other stuff through bridges.