Russian Google Competitor Embraces Open Source Messaging 127
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."
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
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.
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 :(
Re:Missing info (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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.
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.)
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: (Score:2)
Cool, I wonder if the adium people think it's to much work to use their implementation, I guess it may be as much changes as writing it yourself =P
Re: (Score:1)
There are some XMPP clients out there that supports both voice and video. GTalk supports voice for instance. However there are currently no standard way to do it, which kinda sucks.
Thing is, there's this newfangled stream technology for XMPP called Jingle that has been in the pipeline for atleast two-three years now. It's in last call and has been for ages. Once that standard go draft, clients will implement it about a year after that. But Jingle is taking so long I'm beginning to suspect Duke Nukem Forever
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
from a GIRL a day or so ago
LIES!
Re: (Score:2)
heh, actually she even told me to install it so we could use it for webcam! Though she's made it pretty clear that, uhm, I don't remember, in some way she didn't liked me (obviously..) in the mail before so I told her I thought we was done talking to each other and how I didn't see the purpose in that (and that I couldn't use the application but how cool it was with a girl using SIP and Jabber instead of MSN ...)
I know it sounds way weird, both sip and jabber and then webcam as well? Maybe it was a transves
Uhm, not Eyeball chat, Eyeball Messenger (Score:2)
http://www.eyeball.com/products/messenger.html [eyeball.com]
I don't know if there is any difference since I've not used the apps. But eventually there are so I better mention it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah because you can't talk with people using MSN, ICQ, so on so on as long as they have an MSN, ICQ-compatible [so on so on] client and an account for that ..
Emphasis added, as well as the second so-on-so-on.
And that's the key part: I have to have an MSN account, and an ICQ account, and a Yahoo account, and a Zephyr account, and a Gadu-Gadu account, and a QQ account, and a $PROTO account.
Then I need an MSN client, and a ..., and a $PROTO client. If I'm really lucky, I can find one universal IM client that doesn't completely suck ass through a very thin straw when I want to IRC with it. If I'm really lucky, it supports all the protocols I want to use.
[If you ca
Re: (Score:2)
I'm well aware of the benefits of Jabber, but regular people don't care if I'm the only one using jabber but all their friends use MSN and everything works with it.
An eventual future where everyone use XMPP would be nice, but that's not the case for now and will probably not be for the next 3-4 years at least, and probably 5+ if at any time.
So for most people it would probably be more like they can use microsofts messenger now, and everything works, or install an additional one to add me on jabber, which th
Re: (Score:2)
SIP itself is typically just as simple to get working from behind a firewall as most any other chat protocol. It normally uses a single TCP stream for text chat and as a control channel, and firewalls have been able to adequately forward TCP streams forever.
The problems start when you want to establish voice or video chat, since those require end-to-end UDP packet delivery. The only (semi-)
Re: (Score:2)
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 :(
What a novel idea- get GIRLs to give out links. That's how to get /.ers to download software from companies they've never heard of.
By the way, if the software Windows-only, then write to the devs and let them know that there is demand for their software on Linux || Mac || your OS of choice. If you don't ask for it then the devs will never know.
Re: (Score:2)
The link may be for an older version, the one I wanted to link to was eyeball messenger, but I only searched for eyeball and took the first hit from google.
Anyway if I remember correctly I did mail them and asked about technologies used (since they claim MSN support and such as well, I guess only thru transports though) and told them I couldn't run it because I used OS X.
Re: (Score:2)
Very cool that you stand up for your OS. I'm not fanboi but if we are not vocal about our _existence_ then nobody will ever write software for our platform.
Re:Missing info (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't suspect you'll even be able to find a FULLY compliant SMTP or HTTP client or server.
Oh, SMTP and HTTP protocols are easy as pie. But you'll need to make difference between the communications protocols and the data that they move around.
It's the presentation and interpretation of data that's spotty - and there's a good reason for that. It's not feasible to support all of those features in all situations. The protocols are designed that way, just to move the data: even if your client doesn't support, say, displaying images in the web, you can still damn well download them.
In other words, the
Re: (Score:2)
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:1)
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.
OT, but I was wondering if you had a source on the facebook chat XMPP thing or if it was just a rumor.
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: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, 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
Re: (Score:2)
Google doesn't support S2S (server to server) part of XMPP protocol. With Google Talk you are limited to talk only to other Google Talk users.
Description implies that Yandex simply made its clone of existing XMPP client which supports S2S out of box.
P.S.
Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia.
Knowing conservatism of Russians, I wouldn't hold my breath. ICQ is popular because there are lots of different clients for it with tons of features. XMPP would take some time to catch up.
Also, due to age of ICQ protocols, many firewalls support i
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure?
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/open_communications.html#service_2 [google.com]
I guess you are new here, it was on ./ 2.5 years ago
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/18/1314217 [slashdot.org]
There isn't a monopoly at Russia (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
And THAT was the part you found odd in the summary? I was personally boggled by the "Many view Yandex as Google's main competitor in russia" part.
Oh really? Do they? Maybe that has something to do with the fact that in Russia, Yandex beats Google by a large margin. Yandex has about 40% share while google.ru about 20% share. Google isn't the worst competitor to Yandex, there.
Technically, it is still correct to say that, just like it would be correct to say "Many view google to be Yahoo's main competitor" but
Re: (Score:1)
That is not the point. The post is not to imply that Yandex is somehow better than Google now. In fact, Google is mentioned more as a way to answer the inevitable "Yandex-who?", and as an eyecatch. :)
The real news here is that a company with 50%+ market (and mind-) share in a sizeable part of Internet, which serves as a success story for all other Internet-based companies in the region, decides to throw its weight behind FOSS and op
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Fukken Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Russian isn't hard at all. Observe. In Soviet Russia, Yandex masturbates to you. See?
Number one...with a bullet. (Score:1)
"Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia."
Why?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Number one...with a bullet. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the Philisophically Equivalent Department (Score:2)
Why not?
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
You think Japan === Eastern, and you criticize me for simplification?
Re: (Score:1)
Have another look at both pages. Yahoo is cluttered and about three screens deep.
Yandex's home page is just one simple screen and easy to look at. Much closer to Google than Yahoo's unreadable mess.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Ah, yes. Very good, thanks. I wonder why the submitter linked to the other one.
And boy, that is minimalistic. Nice and clean.
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Because Russia is cool?
Re:Why is this important? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
A curious fact: Google is the number one search engine in all but three (China, Russia, France - I might be wrong about France) major countries.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In before.... (Score:1)
Re:In before.... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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: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.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me Google is better, since they are actually encouraging the use of other clients.
Re: (Score:1)
They are "encouraging the use of other clients" by not providing an option for Linux. I think you should have said they are "requiring the use of other clients if you want an Open Source solution."
So, they are better because they're offering is closed source and thus encouraging people to use another client?
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)
Out of the box VoIP perhaps?
You're right that there is no out-of-the-box VoIP for GChat on Linux. But Google is doing the right thing for that: they are creating open standards for integrating VoIP into Jabber. This involves a lot of negotiation and dialog with a lot of people and groups and open source developers.
Short of waving a magic wand and have the standards appear out of nowhere and implement themselves, what do you want them to do?
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.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:1, Funny)
Well my karma is in the way down, might as well encourage it!
Why is it that open source is always 'embraced'? (Score:1, Funny)
Can't it be just joined, takes up.. emm .. anything else?
I always wondered why different people from every part of the world came to "embrace" open source?
This open source guy must be a very cosy man .. or a very good kisser ;)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You have to embrace it before you can extend and extinguish it.
Duh.
A wordle of the comment feed (Score:1)
Thanks for this information (Score:2, Funny)
not a competitor (Score:1)
Even if Yandex wishes to believe this, it's no competitor even to Yahoo or MSN etc, because it is first a directory with results being ranked based on who paid more. Simply search for 'russkey' in yandex vs any other search engine. First few dozens of pages from yandex will be results of a Russian firm while results from other search engines will be ranked based on the popularity of FF add on.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The XMPP server used is ejabberd (Score:1)
This is a flexible and powerful XMPP server written in Erlang.
Portugal was the 1st! (Score:1)
The largest ISP in Portugal who detains the largest portal (SAPO [www.sapo.pt]) developped (along with the Psi team, like Justin Karneges, one of Psi creators) the SAPO Messenger [messenger.sapo.pt] it's own IM back in 2004 with the same features plus, SMS and VOIP to land lines and mobiles, gateway to MSN,ICQ etc ... so I don't the understand where from came the idea the Russia is such an enterpreneur country.
Firefox (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
What does this have to do with Yandex?
You don't see many people boycotting Google for the war in Iraq.
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:1)
[ Looks back on Prague-smashed-by-Russian tanks-in-1968. ]
But the US left Iraq democratic and free (to do it wants after 2010. The US got no benefit from Iraq and a massive black eye. The Russians have a post-WW-II history of destroying everything they touch that makes Bush pale by comparison. Why give them a free pass in Georgia?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I was being sarcastic.
If you scroll back through the archives, when the US threatened to invade Iraq, every Slashdot thread from top-to-bottom was on fire with Europeans, Indians, Canadians, etc screaming bloody murder.
But several countries have invaded each other since then, even with overtly evil intentions in mind, but you'll see people defend China and Russia into the ground, or simply mod you down, if you've got a blurb to speak about either.
The way I see things, Europe really should be worried abo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
There are several points why I prefer XMPP over ICQ:
- XMPP is decentralized. I can choose which provider I trust. If the provider fucks up something I can choose another or even run my own server.
- XMPP is an open protocol. And it is quite easy to implement the basic functionality (IM). This leads to dozens of compatible clients for almost every imaginable platform.
- ICQ once in a while changes something that breaks every non-official client for no fucking reason.
- XMPP has great potential lifting it above
Re: (Score:2)