GoogleTalk is dead, Jim!
By way of a comment to a post I wrote back in May 2013 about Google seeming to kill off XMPP/Jabber support in Google+ Hangouts (spoiler: They did!), I learned from a friend that the GoogleTalk API was officially deprecated as of February 23, 2015. I confirmed this by finding a Google+ post from Google’s Mayur Kamat.
Now, this is not a surprise. Google has been clear that Hangouts was the replacement and also that Hangouts does not support XMPP:
Still, I’m sad to see the XMPP integration die off. It is just a continuation of the descent of messaging services into walled gardens … a topic I’ve been writing about for many years.
On that note, it was really no surprise to see the media reports about Microsoft killing off Google and Facebook chat support in its Outlook.com service. Microsoft made this Google integration available back in May 2013, but today Microsoft really has no choice:
- Google has killed off XMPP integration with Hangouts.
- Facebook has killed off XMPP integration with their new v2.0 API.
And so Microsoft can only offer Outlook.com its own proprietary walled garden… Skype!
Goodbye GoogleTalk and… sadly… goodbye XMPP integration!
As far as I’m concerned, Google Talk became a walled garden when they stopped federating with other XMPP services like jabber.org. This only completes the process.
Well said, Jim! 🙁
Arguably, Google Talk did not stop federating with jabber.org. It’s just that jabber.org requires TLS encryption for server-to-server communication and Google could not be bothered to add that feature even ten years after RFC 3920
Philipp – Ah, that makes sense. Yes, Jabber.org added that requirement as part of the Ubiquitous Encryption Manifesto within the XMPP community last year and so as of May 2014 the connection with Google would have dropped. Thanks for adding that point.
Dan
Does that mean there might be a future SIP client in the making…XMPP was good but for enterprise integration SIP should be a good choice..
Couldn’t leave this uncommented: http://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for-google-talk/
(I have seen a number of other people getting this wrong recently)
Philipp,
Many thanks for pointing out that XSF post. I’ve now updated the article to have a link. While I agree that it may not be the end of “XMPP for Google Talk”, it seems to me that we’re getting closer to the end for “Google Talk”, i.e. the product Google has focused on for the future is Hangouts.
Anyway, thanks for pointing out the post.
Dan
sadly they’re not committed to “client choice” or “service choice” anymore 🙁
Does this mean if I’m using a third-party client to connect with Hangouts, I’m transmitting plaintext?
I’m assuming this is why Google Apps (Google for Work) accounts that are relatively new, no longer connect in iMessage?
Alexandra – Sounds like a good assumption… although there could also be some setting in Google Apps that needs to be changed (I’ve found this in some cases).
Moving just a step aside from the discussion of Google XMPP being dead or alive, which in my eyes Google has effectively killed, there is another fly in the ointment. If you choose to connect to Google’s servers using any Hangouts type clients, well, there goes predictable XMPP presence control.
Hangouts logins tend to linger even when all clients are gracefully logged off of an account. Beyond showing theses ghost logins on the XMPP side for hours and sometimes an entire day, the active status behaves very strangely, with similar delays on the XMPP side while Hangouts is not reporting as active. Never mind that the active status triggers and timeouts are not user configurable in Hangouts clients. Oh, and offline messaging is not honored on the XMPP side, forcing you to use a Hangouts client if you want to retrieve offline messages. Hangouts is also increasingly required for things like Google Voice integration, which gets sticky when you want to use one Google service but not the other yet have to be logged into everything via Hangouts. One workaround is to create separate Google accounts for each service, but that gets cumbersome to manage and certainly breaks the single point of contact paradigm.
It’s clear to me that Google doesn’t want anyone using XMPP clients and is making it very unattractive to do so.
Methinks NSA has scored a hit with Hangouts non-encryption.