XMPP is a Russian nesting doll of garbage and the optional XMPP extensions ruined it for everyone because clients are always half baked.

XML inside XML inside XML inside XML inside

Edit: PSYC outlines XMPP problems pretty well. I wish PSYC was more prevalent.

http://about.psyc.eu/XMPP

The technical part doesn't really matter. The problematic part is that Facebook (and Google) took a page from old Microsoft and applied "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to the one alternative we had for an open and federated messaging platform.

If anything, this should be a lesson for consumers and to learn how to not give that much power to a couple of organizations.

> The technical part doesn't really matter.

Why.

Because lots of things flourish despite not being the most beautifully designed piece of technology. Git survives despite its widely-derided UI, email proliferates despite spam, and Linux is dominant despite having a less beautiful kernel than BSD.

What matters is how useful users think it is. Whether developers think the code is beautiful is less important for adoption.

Yeah, these things are mostly true (apart from git, which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS), but I don't understand why did you suddenly switch from a question about a decision by a particular company to a question of wide adoption of technology by a community.

And your second paragraph misses the point: it's not about one of the factors, it's about balance between them. In this particular case, the amount of users who prefer XMPP doesn't seem to be big enough to counter the pain of supporting it.

> which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS

Wow, I can easily imagine much better interfaces. In fact I don't even have to imagine - Mercurial is way nicer.

Shame mercurial didn't catch on. I started learning DVCS' with mercurial, back when they were still a new concept, and git wasn't very good (this is an understatement, git was horrible back then).

What I really liked was the very friendly and usable command line interface, out of the box shortcuts (which I now emulate in my .gitconfig), clear help pages. It was a bit slower than git for enormous projects but it worked wonderfully for me.

Mercurial had a more familiar, but much worse interface than git.

More familiar because it was essentially subversions interface made suitable for a dvcs.

Worse for lacking (or requiring plugins for) features like the index, commit amending, rebasing, lightweight branches, etc.

Git didn't have any of those things either except "lightweight branches". It wasn't until 2006 or so that git grew a reasonable commit command. Before then, people relied on tools such as cogito in order to get work done.

Also, Linux kernel uses git! So it has a traction. Once people get used to a tool they stick to it.

Yeah as much as I appreciate the concept of XMPP, I find it unlikely that the average person cares about that sort of stuff. Of course, I'm limited to the people I know, so maaaaybe I'm mistaken, but if you think about the average Facebook user (Joe Smith, has 600 friends he barely knows, likes to quote songs in his statuses), what are the odds they would NOT want a dedicated app or tab?

Hopefully xmpp, as well as sip and http, helped the tech folks to learn that "it's text based therefore it's simple" does not hold.

"The tech folks", "text based therefore simple", suggesting anybody ever used XML and simple in one sentence, implying http would be better off binary, … how can such a small comment pack such a misleading punch.

Impressive, in a way.

The point isn't text → simple (semantics), it's text > binary (syntax).

Complexity is mostly a property of semantics, text vs binary is about the syntax used to convey those semantics. For the same semantics, text is easier to debug than binary. That's all.

XMPP bad. Binary XMPP worse. Etc.

ASCII-hex encoded binary XMPP, mmm... "a018ab978d9877c6" is still text, after all!

Well then we're three :)

There's Dozens of us!

A dozen!

Four ;)