Russian Google Competitor Embraces Open Source Messaging

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."

Missing info

As it turns out, the IM service is based on the open XMPP protocol

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

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.

Re:Missing info

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 :(

Re:Missing info

Well when we say "an XMPP account with someone somewhere" we mean an XMPP account with any federated XMPP server; any domain. Can you set up your own AIM server and add it to the network? Also, Jabber is extensible and has voice chat through Jingle [wikipedia.org], which is what gtalk uses.

Re:Missing info

Can you set up your own AIM server and add it to the network?

No, but AIM users can talk to Jabber. [slashdot.org]

Re:Missing info

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 ..

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.

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.

XMPP supports voice and video through the Jingle extension [xmpp.org], which originally came from and is supported by GTalk, if I recall correctly.

Re:Missing info

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.)

Re:

This summer there was a Summer of Code project for Voice/Video and I think the guy made pretty good progress, but I think right now if you grab the VV branch from monotone and are able to compile it you will only be able to talk to people who are also using Pidgin. But at least it's a start, and maybe next summer someone will finish the job, if the developers aren't able to finish it or don't want to (I suspect more of the latter, but I'm OK with it since the only person I would talk to on google talk is my

Re:Missing info

I've worked with XMPP, and despite having it's own organization devoted to developing the standard, it suffers from a lot of issues regarding actual standardization. Most of these issues are in the form of deprecated extensions. I think that will be the biggest hurdle for XMPP - yay standardization and open source and all that, but when old clients do things in a deprecated way and new clients do things the right way and don't bother with the deprecated features (because they're deprecated) then you start having some issues. Just look at all the extensions and tell me that this is a viable protocol for interoperability: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ [xmpp.org]

True of all but the smallest open protocols

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.

Re:

OT, but I was wondering if you had a source on the facebook chat XMPP thing or if it was just a rumor.

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:

Yandex doesn't really need any advertising. It has a well-established market presence in the Russian-speaking world, and no services for other languages. Not every sketchily-written summary involving two corporations is a Slashvertisement, captain.

Re:

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

Looking at that disaster of a front page, I'd say these guys are competing with Yahoo, not Google.

Re:Hmmm

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.)

Re:Hmmm

Yandex has a light [ya.ru] version of their website (even more minimalistic than Google), just like Yahoo [yahoo.com]. The reason why Yandex is still more popular than Google in Russia is because it handles language-specific morphological variations of words better.

Gchat

Gchat also uses XMPP, and you can use any client that supports the protocol, like say Pidgin.

Re:Gchat

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.

Re:

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:

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:Fukken Awesome

If I knew how to communicate in the Russian language, I'd probably be masturbating to Yandex brand right now.

Russian isn't hard at all. Observe. In Soviet Russia, Yandex masturbates to you. See?

Re:Number one...with a bullet.

Because XMPP is a standard, and OSCAR isn't? Because XMPP supports communication between users of any server configured for XMPP federation and OSCAR is AOL's personal playground?

Re:In before....

In Soviet Russia, a thousand jokes post before YOU!!

Re:Why is this important?

Because some of us are actually interested in the rest of the world outside USA. Most of the slashdot stories are USA centric. Just look at the front page, FAA, Sarah Palin, DMCA mentioned casually as if everybody is familiar with them. Every once in a while another country gets mentioned and there is somebody complaining about it

Re:

You have to embrace it before you can extend and extinguish it.

Duh.