Bear's Log

yea, that's a subtle title alright :/

I posted this earlier on Google+ and decided to cross-post it here as I realized that it was more hipster ironic than I wanted to be (to post about Google changing things on the same G+ stream they are changing things to focus on.)

So here is a cut-n-paste of what I said over there

I just found out the hard way that GTalk on Android has been silently replaced by Hangouts and the do-no-evil geniuses have removed everything dealing with XMPP from it ... everything

The "hard way" is from the fact that I did not get a server alert on my phone because Hangouts no longer supports outside messages from XMPP sources (also known as Federation.)

This has me all worked up in a lot of ways.

Personally - a lot of my friends are XMPP users so now I no longer have a single client for my messaging needs and this means that GTalk will not be my primary tool, heck I may not load it at all now.

Professionally - I'm a member of the XMPP Software Foundation and we have been very proud about XMPP being the core of a lot of commercial communication products (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco and many others) and even tho each commercial entity does odd things (heck, breaks them also) the one thing that stood out was Federation.

Now Google is removing a core part of their messaging and replacing it with something that is not an Open standard and hell, to be blunt, is a horrible implementation of a messaging system. The Hangouts support forum is full of people wondering, like me, what happened to many features they depended on and also asking WTF!

So even tho I know Google engineers may not ever see this, I just have to ask: when will you be changing your motto from "do no evil" to "meh, we just do what we want because we are now the new borg"

Yea, I'm pissed, pissed enough that I won't be buying Android as my next phone and I'm going to be putting my full effort behind the infrastructure behind Firefox OS

Edit: yea, I was pissed but like most extreme reactions it was short lived as more reasonable people pointed out that it may not have been done on purpose and they should have a chance to respond. Plus, can you really see me using an iPhone!?!