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Russian Google Competitor Embraces Open Source Messaging
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Sep 06, 2008 09:25 PM
from the bilingual-pun-says-wikipedia dept.
from the bilingual-pun-says-wikipedia dept.
rm writes "Internet search and mail provider Yandex, which many view to be Google's main competitor in Russia, has recently added an instant messaging capability to its mail notifier application Ya.Online. As it turns out, the IM service is based on the open XMPP protocol, with connectivity to all other public Jabber servers available from day one. MacOS X and GNU/Linux versions of the app were also released (complete with sources under the GPL) and are determined to be based on the Psi IM client. Yandex looks to be a firm believer in open-source, also running a mirror site for FOSS and actively promoting its branded version of Firefox. Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia."
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Well, what do you expect? (Score:2, Funny)
They're communists! Duh.
Missing info (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary makes it sound like this is some major advantage over Google. GTalk is also based on XMPP.
But hey, Slashdot needs to pay the bills, and this makes a great Slashvertisment for Yandex.
Re:Missing info (Score:5, Interesting)
True. Also, Facebook claims that it will be implementing XMPP eventually. That would bring millions of users an open standard chat protocol. And hopefully make currently-buggy facebook chat actually work.
One reason I like Gtalk over Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc. is that it can talk to others not using Gtalk as long as they have some sort of XMPP-compatible chat client and an XMPP account with someone somewhere.
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Re:Missing info (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah because you can't talk with people using MSN, ICQ, so on so on as long as they have an MSN, ICQ-compatible client and an account for that ..
Atleast ICQ is better than MSN, and russian (?) QIP supports both ICQ and Jabber so that makes it easier for the russians which want both.
I'd like to try to convince people to use XMPP but as long as it don't support voice and webcam there is no reason to even try. There must be a couple of clients which does it in the same way first.
I'd prefer if people used SIP I guess if it wasn't because people have a hard time getting it to work behind firewalls.
I was given a link to http://www.eyeballchat.com/ [eyeballchat.com] from a GIRL a day or so ago and that seems to be a SIP + XMPP client in one package, and also got past firewalls, but sadly it's Windows only so I haven't tried it :(
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Re:Missing info (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Missing info (Score:4, Informative)
Can you set up your own AIM server and add it to the network?
No, but AIM users can talk to Jabber. [slashdot.org]
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Re: (Score:2)
No, this is just a way to connect to the ICQ network by using an XMPP client, it still doesn't federate (talk to other XMPP servers).
Besides, I've never managed to connect to this service, I think they've canceled this project.
Re:Missing info (Score:5, Informative)
An account for that... on MSN. Accounts on those networks are tied to the operator of the network. XMPP is decentralised, like email, so ISPs can provide their own servers, or you can use your own server.
XMPP supports voice and video through the Jingle extension [xmpp.org], which originally came from and is supported by GTalk, if I recall correctly.
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Re:Missing info (Score:4, Interesting)
Gtalk don't do video, it does audio, however there are only a very limited amount of clients which supports the audio part. For instance Pidgin and Adium don't*.
I appologise if I missread/missunderstood if you where talking about running a server by oneself.
* Sure it was nice to see atleast miranda there, but well, until most / enough clients support it it won't help much and voice isn't enough, most people use skype/teamspeak/ventrilo for voice only anyway
But webcam/voip have always been of very low priority by the developers of pidgin/libpurple and therefor adium is lacking to (since it use their libs.)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Empathy on GNOME works fine with audio AND video over the XMPP.
Jingle is extensible, it can support just about any payload type you can think of :)
Re:Missing info (Score:5, Interesting)
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True of all but the smallest open protocols (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats not really fair.
Show me a public/open protocol used on the internet that has a peice of software that supports ALL of its features.
I don't suspect you'll even be able to find a FULLY compliant SMTP or HTTP client or server. Possibly something on the FTP client list.
HTTP is extensible, once you take that into account its practically impossible to have 100% interoperability. My web browser for instance could give a damn about the fact that IIS says its running ASP.NET crap.
Even my browser doesn't know what to do with the ASP.NET header, it still works. Actually, it does know what to do with it, which is nothing, but thats coincidence in this case. Some other web server could possibly send me a header that DOES require action of some sort, and my browser may not know what to do with it. But I'm not really worried about not viewing pages.
I've been using Openfire as an XMPP server for a few years, a good year within the current company I work for, I've yet to have a problem with connecting between clients for sending IMs, internal or external. I communicate with several people on googles service, and many scattered across the Internet with their own servers, god knows how many clients shared between Linux, OS X, Windows and even an OpenSolaris machine or two.
If you think the xmpp extensions are bad, you should take a look at specs like HTML and CSS. They are certainly 100% doable, but NO ONE does. You do what you need to do to work with most clients/targets the rest is gravy.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You really should take a look at the /. headers, they are full of X-* jokes and puns.
Re: (Score:2)
despite having it's own organization devoted to developing the standard [...] Most of these issues are in the form of deprecated extensions.
"despite" is the wrong word here. If you have a bunch of people that are paid for developing a standard, that standard will constantly evolve.
I think the real reason for all those changes all the time is that the standard is relatively new. This will settle in the next few years, when the optimal solution for every feature has been found.
However, even now it's not that bad, because implementing most of those extensions is relatively easy, and supporting both the new and old variant of features can be done (
Re: (Score:2)
True. Also, Facebook claims that it will be implementing XMPP eventually. That would bring millions of users an open standard chat protocol.
Sure, but note that nowhere in that post does it say they are connecting to the other XMPP networks, they only mention logging into your facebook chat with another client. Too bad they haven't committed to taking down any part of the walls around their garden.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe livejournal also supports XMPP...
Incidentally, ICQ by using numeric identifiers is incredibly prone to spam, i still maintain an ICQ number and i get flooded with spam, most of which is russian.
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, you only get ICQ spam when you enable the web indicator, because those spamming bots only send their messages to online account.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes — I originally read about it in the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]; it cited a facebook developers blog post [facebook.com] as the source.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. The summary is bunk. I setup an XMPP federation for the company I work for, and about 5 minutes after the first server was up and running, my client was communicating with a Google employee via xmpp to their GTalk client.
Its worked great and I encourage anyone who wants to communicate with me via IM to use GTalk if they do not have any other XMPP alternative.
This IS the way to go (currently) for instant messaging. Its like SMTP for ANY type of message, not just text, with some state and status i
Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at that disaster of a front page, I'd say these guys are competing with Yahoo, not Google.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Cultures vary surprisingly widely on what constitutes "good design". Many Asian cultures, for instance, all but require you to have a very busy page.
In a way, I'm surprised at how some of it turns out. If you came up to me and asked me which of the "East" or "West" would prefer Google to Yahoo, I'd have picked East to prefer the Google aesthetic and West to prefer the Yahoo approach, but I would be wrong. (Very, very broadly speaking. I am aware I am generalizing, this is a Slashdot comment, not a sociology PhD thesis. Please don't cite "a counterexample" at me and think it proves anything.)
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
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Gchat (Score:5, Informative)
Gchat also uses XMPP, and you can use any client that supports the protocol, like say Pidgin.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Right, but GoogleTalk is not Open Source, see: http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en [google.com]
And GoogleTalk isn't available for GNU/Linux.
And Google doesn't host a mirror of OSS projects (except GoogleCode, which is different).
Anything else?
Re:Gchat (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the beauty of it: GoogleTalk doesn't need to be open source. Because it uses an open protocol, we can make our own tools to communicate with it, rather being stuck with Google's.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is of course true, but that doesn't mean that Google's implementation is anywhere near as open as Yandex.
Google: Open Protocol, Closed Client
Yandex: Open Protocol, Open Client
Looks like Yandex wins.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me Google is better, since they are actually encouraging the use of other clients.
Re: (Score:2)
by not providing an option for Linux
Why should they? There are several excellent options for Linux as well, and they are pre-installed. How could they possibly do better than that?
So, they are better because they're offering is closed source and thus encouraging people to use another client?
No, they are better because they rely on existing solutions where they exist. Linux ships with XMPP clients, Windows does not. Hence, they need to do something for Windows. Windows is the exception here that require
Re: (Score:2)
if they'd push it more and lean on other IM services to support it
They tried. They pushed hard form AIM interoperability, and they didn't even get that really working.
It's the other services that aren't doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing is stopping you from using any open client with gtalk.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
About Adium - it uses libpurple (from Pidgin) for connecting to all the IM services. If you look at the Pidgin changelogs, most of it is usually libpurple fixes - leading me to believe that Adium can look so good because it's not busy fixing the library everyone uses. It's not that Pidgin's team does a bad job - it's that they do a good job on the actual messaging part and have little time left over for UI redesigns.
Re: (Score:2)
I honestly don't mind Pidgin's UI.
Sure, Adium is easily one of the best-designed apps on the planet (in terms of being visually appealing, functional, and customizable in all the right places), but I never saw Pidgin as being particularly bad.
Yeah, it's a bit clunky on Windows, though other good alternatives exist on that platform, and it's still easily one of the best GTK+ apps on Win32. Pidgin does need to move to a native toolkit for its windows version, though what's there now isn't all that bad.
Thanks for this information (Score:2, Funny)
If only Gadu Gadu could be killed (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish something open standards would come along that could kill Gadu Gadu in Poland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadu_gadu [wikipedia.org]
The Gadu Gadu client for Windows used to be a lot like the original versions of ICQ, now it is a bloated and ad supported POS. Good luck with it if you want to use it on a Mac or Unix-alike there used to be official clients that worked, but for about two years now using clients other than the official ones has been forbidden with the network. The open source projects have varying degrees of working but it seems that the protocol is tweaked every now and then so it is hard to keep-up.
Google Yandex for search anyway (Score:2)
But at least I now know a good mirror where I can download Linux distros :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Shit, I meant Google is_more_than Yandex. Stupid slashcode.
Re:Fukken Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Russian isn't hard at all. Observe. In Soviet Russia, Yandex masturbates to you. See?
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Re:Number one...with a bullet. (Score:5, Insightful)
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From the Philisophically Equivalent Department (Score:2)
Why not?
Re:In before.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Why is this important? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2)
He's not complaining that Russian company got mentioned, he's complaining that a Russian company got mentioned because it's competition to Google. His statement is that there's probably a company in every country that competes with Google, so why is this one worth noting to anyone who lives outside of Russian borders?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If a company becomes successful in one country, sooner or later they will want to expand out of their borders seeking new potential business.
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Re: (Score:2)
If you were shooting for +5 Insightful, your best bet on Slashdot would have been replacing "Russia" with "United States" and "Georgia" with "Iraq".
The more you know.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You have to embrace it before you can extend and extinguish it.
Duh.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems you want ICQ to disappear. Why? It works for me and for millions other people in Russia.
There's an I in "Index" (Score:3, Informative)
So, the term "yandex" replaces the "I" in "Index" with "I", in Russian it comes out "yah" + "ndex" => yandex.
Why "index"? Well all search engines work by building huge inverted indexes (but we s