May 2013 archive
May 24
TDYR #010 – Further Thoughts On Google Voice And Google+ Hangouts
May 23
Did Google REALLY Kill Off All XMPP/Jabber Support In Google+ Hangouts? It Still Seems To Partially Work
Did Google really kill off all of their support for XMPP (Jabber) in Google+ Hangouts? Or is it still there in a reduced form? Will they be bringing back more support? What is really going on here?
In my excitement yesterday about Google Voice now being integrated with Google+ Hangouts, I missed a huge negative side of the new Hangouts change that is being widely reported: the removal of support for the XMPP (Jabber) protocol and interoperability with third-party clients.
But yet a few moments ago I did have a chat from an external XMPP client (Apple's "Messages" app) with Randy Resnick who received the message in a Google+ Hangout. I opened up a Google+ window in my browser and I could see the exchange happening there as well. Here's a side-by-side shot of the exchange in both clients:
So what is going on here?
Reports Of Google Removing XMPP
This issue has been widely reported in many of the tech blogs and sites. Matt Landis covered this issue very well in his post: Hangouts Won’t Hangout With Other Messaging Vendors: Google’s New Unified Messaging Drops Open XMPP/Jabber Interop which then generated long threads on Reddit and Slashdot.
The Verge in their lengthy story about Google+ Hangoutscontains this statement from Google's Nikhyl Singhal:
Talk, for example, was built to help enterprise users communicate better, Singhal says. "The notion of creating something that’s social and that’s always available wasn’t the same charter as we set out with when we created Talk." With Hangouts, Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very "open" XMPP standard that it helped pioneer.
The "Google Talk for Developers" pagealso very clearly states this:
Note: We announced a new communications product, Hangouts, in May 2013. Hangouts will replace Google Talk and does not support XMPP.
A Google+ post by Nikhyl Singhal has generated a large amount of comments (not solely about XMPP) and a post from Google's Ben Eidelson about how Google Messenger will be changed by Hangouts has also received many comments.
There was also a Hacker News thread about the news out of Google AppEngine that apps hosted there would not be able to communicate users of the new Hangouts app via XMPP - and providing a couple of workarounds.
A couple of Google+ threads from Matt Mastracci and Jan Wildeboer are also worth reading as is this note from Daniel Pentecost about how he has lost interop with his clients / customers.
But Is XMPP Support Still There?
I was a bit puzzled, though, by a couple of comments from Google's Ben Eidelson down in one of the G+ threads:
Ben Eidelson
+Thomas Heinen Thanks for your report of the issue. Hangouts supports basic interop with XMPP, so you can-for the time being-continue to use 3rd party clients. It does not work the same way as Talk, and so I believe the issue you're having with the XMPP bridge will not resolve in Hangouts.
Jason Summerfield
+Ben Eidelson So there is still some basic XMPP functionality under the hood? Does this mean that Hangouts will still be able to communicate with federated Jabber servers/clients, at least for now?Ben Eidelson
+Jason Summerfield Not federated support, but supports interop with XMPP clients. Meaning you can continue to use XMPP clients to log in to Google Talk and those messages will interop with folks on Hangouts.
It was this that prompted me to call up Messages on my Mac, where I am logged in via XMPP to my GMail account, and to initiate a chat with Randy as shown above. We found we could chat perfectly fine. We couldn't initiate a callinto a Google+ Hangout from an external XMPP client - although I'll be honest and say I don't know how well that worked in the past. My own usage of external clients has entirely been for chat.
So What Is The Story?
I don't know. The statement quoted in The Verge's story seems pretty definitive that XMPP has been dropped, as does the message sent to AppEngine developers. It does seem so far that:
- "Server-to-server" XMPP, used for federation with other servers / services, has been dropped.
- "Presence" and status messages have been dropped (because the idea seems to be with Hangouts that you just send a message and people will get it either right then or whenever they are next online).
- Within the Hangouts app, you can only connect to people with Google+ accounts, i.e. contacts on external XMPP servers no longer appear.
- Google hasn't made any clear statements on what exactly is going on.
But is this partial XMPP support only temporary? Will it go away at some point whenever Hangouts fully "replaces" GoogleTalk? Or is this a communication mixup? (As happened recently with Google's announcement of DNSSEC support for their Public DNS Service?)
For me the disappointment in all of this is mostly that Google has been one of the largest advocates for the open XMPP protocol and I enjoyed the fact that I could use multiple different chat clients to interact with my GoogleTalk account. I was also very intrigued by the federation that we were starting to see between GTalk and other systems out there via XMPP.
Whereas before Google+ seemed to be an interesting social/messaging backbone to which I could connect many different apps and systems, now Google+ is looking like simply yet another proprietary walled garden - and we don't need more of those!
Hopefully we'll hear something more out of Google soon.
P.S. Here's another interesting viewpoint: Google Hangouts and XMPP – is cloud harming the Internet?
UPDATE: In a comment over on Google+, Daniel Pentecost states that Randy and I were not actually using Hangouts:
Dan, you weren't actually chatting through Hangouts. You were chatting through Google Talk which itself has a bridge into Hangouts. It only works b/c Randy is a Gmail user and still has access to Google Talk in Gmail.
Perhaps that is the case, which again then begs the question of whether this is only a temporary capability until GoogleTalk is shut down.
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May 23
TDYR #009 – Google Aims To Disrupt Telecom By Unifying Google Voice And Google+ Hangouts
May 22
You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To Hangouts
Want to hear the sound of Google further disrupting the world of telecom? If you have a Google Voice number and also use Google+ (as I do) with the Hangouts feature enabled, you'll soon be hearing this new sound if you haven't already.
An Unexpected Ringing
Yesterday a random PR person called the phone number in the sidebar of this blog to pitch me on why I should write about her client. This phone number is through Google Voice and I knew by the fact that my cell phone and Skype both started ringing simultaneously that someone was calling that number.
But as I was deciding whether or not to actually answer the call, I realized that there was another "ringing" sound coming from my computer that I had not heard before. Flipping quickly through my browser windows I found my Google+ window where this box appeared at the top of the "Hangouts" sidebar on the right:
Now, of course, I HAD to answer the call, even though I knew from experience that most calls to that number are PR pitches. I clicked the "Answer" button and in a moment a regular "Hangout" window appeared, complete with my own video, and with an audio connection to the phone call.
The PR person and I then had a pleasant conversation where I rather predictably determined quickly that she'd probably never actually readthis blog or she would have known that I've never written about her client's type of software. Be that as it may, the audio quality of the call was great and the call went on without any issues.
A subsequent test showed me that I also had access to the dialpad had I needed to send any button presses (for instance, in interacting with an IVR or robocall):
The only real "issue" with the phone call was that when I pressed the "Hang up" button I wound up still being in the Hangouts window with this message displayed:
The irony of course is that that phone number was never in the "video call"... at least via video. Regardless, I was now alone in the video call with my camera still running. I needed to press the "Exit" button in the upper right corner of the Hangouts window. Outside of that, the user experience for the phone call was fine.
The Future Of Google Voice?
Like many people interested in what Google is doing with Google+, I had read the announcement from Google of the new streams and Hangouts features last week and had gone ahead and installed the iOS Hangouts app onto my iPhone to try it out (marking Google's entrance into the OTT VoIP space). But nowhere in there had I seen that this connection was going to happen between Google Voice and Hangouts. I'd seen speculation in various media sites, but nothing direct.
So it was a bit of a surprise when it happened... particularly because I'd done nothing to enable it. Google had simply connected my Google Voice number to my Google+ account.
I admit that it is a pleasant surprise... although I do wish for the sake of my laptop's CPU that I could somehow configure it to NOT launch myvideo when I get an audio-only call. Yes, I can just go stop my video, but that's an annoying extra step.
It seems, though, that another feature removed from Hangouts, at least temporarily, was the ability to make outbound phone calls. Given that all signs of Google Voice were removed from Google's interface and replaced by "Hangouts", this has predictably upset people who used the service, particularly those who paid for credits to make outgoing calls. There does seem to be a way to restore the old Chat interfacefor those who want to make outgoing calls so that is at least a temporary workaround.
Google's Nikhyl Singhal posted to Google+ about the new Hangouts featuresstating these two points:
1) Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.
2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.
I'm sure that won't satisfy those who are troubled by the change, but it will be interesting to see where they go with Hangouts and voice communication.
(Note: the comment thread on Nikhyl Singhal's Google+ post makes for very interesting reading as people are sounding off there about what they'd like to see in a Hangouts / Google Voice merger.)
Will Hangouts Do SIP?
Of course, my big question will be... will Hangouts let us truly move beyond the traditional telephony of the PSTN and into the world of IP-based communications where can connect directly over the Internet? Google Voice once briefly let us receive VoIP calls using the SIP protocol - can Hangouts finally deliver on this capability? (And let us make outbound SIP calls as well?)
What do you think? Do you like this new linkage of Google Voice PSTN numbers to your Google+ account?
UPDATE #1 - I have written a follow-up post about XMPP support in Hangouts and confusion over what level of XMPP/Jabber support is still in Google+ Hangouts.
Audio commentary related to this post can be found in TDYR episode #009 on SoundCloud:
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May 22
Video: My Discussion of DNSSEC and DANE with VoIP / SIP on The VUC
Back on May 3, 2013, I participated in a VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call on precisely these questions. In the call that went for close to 90 minutes I outlined what DNSSEC and DANE are all about, how they work in a web browser world and how they could potentially work in a world of VoIP with SIP. We also discussed the current support for DNSSEC in the Jitsi softphone and the Kamailio SIP server. There was also a healthy question and answer period where we went off on different tangents. I referenced a presentation I made at SIPNOC 2013 and the slides for that presentation as well as other resources are available from the Deploy360 DNSSEC and VoIP page.
It was a great call and the video is available on YouTube:
If you want to just listen to the audio, you can play or download it from the VUC episode page.
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May 21
TDYR #008 – The Moore Tornado And The Internet As A Powerful Tool For Organizing In Times Of Crisis
May 21
Switzerland Edges Out Romania As Top In IPv6 Adoption (via Google)
By way of a message to the “ipv6-ops” mailing list this morning we learned the fun fact that according to Google’s IPv6 Statistics Switzerland has edged out Romania as the country with the most IPv6 adoption coming in at 9.47% versus Romania at 8.63%.
Given that Romania has held the lead in IPv6 adoption for quite some time, as shown in Eric Vyncke’s comparison stats, the rise by Switzerland is quite interesting to see.
I’ll note that some of the other IPv6 statistics sites do not yet show Switzerland with the same percentage as Google, but this may have to do with both methodology and timing. For instance, Eric Vyncke’s web browser comparison uses Google’s data and so tomorrow may show the higher percentage given that today it says it is based on yesterday’s data. Regardless of the exact measurements, Eric’s chart for Switzerland shows the dramatic climb, as does a chart from APNIC using a different measurement system.
As to why the jump in IPv6, a message to the ipv6-ops list indicated that the carrier Swisscom has been turning on IPv6 and this is backed up by APNIC’s stats for Swisscom.
Kudos to the team at Swisscom who is making IPv6 available! It’s great to see… and now we look forward to seeing how long Switzerland will retain this lead – or what country will be next to take the leadership crown in IPv6 adoption.
May 20
FIR #704 – 5/20/13 – For Immediate Release
May 20
TDYR #007 – Reflections On Galway And Travel In Ireland
May 19
Two Years Of Cancer – The Other Reason For The Trip To Ireland
Beyond the fact that I had a conference in Dublin, Ireland, there was a second and much more powerful reason why my wife accompanied me on this trip. You see, it was two years ago on May 16th when a doctor told us that Lori had cancer.
It was in July 2011 when she had her surgery and it was shortly after that when they told us she had invasive cancer and would need chemo and much more... but the date of May 16 will be forever remembered by us as the day that everything changed.
To say that it's been two years of hell would be a mild understatement - and I've written about much of the trials of the first year as well as the subsequent treatment with Herceptin.
At this stage, the treatment continues - she has four more years of daily Tamoxifen pills with all the glorious fun of chemically-induced menopause, joint pain, ongoing fatigue and all the other side effects. As a spouse of someone going through it all, it's very tough to watch all that she is going through - all with the hope that it will be enough to keep her cancer away.
So on May 16th, we left my conference in Dublin behind and set out to explore Ireland and see what we could see... no plans, no schedules and not even any hotel rooms. Just the two of us and a rental car.
Each day we continue to seek out "the new normal", whatever that is, and to learn to live with this very unwelcome guest in our lives. This trip was our way to celebrate a dark anniversary and say in our own way that we will not let cancer win.
