News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything Else on Their Phone. Parent comment

Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by josephg on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:05PM (#13347616)
My take is that if we look at a longer view, right now messaging apps are fighting for marketshare by competing on features. This is a really useful fight to have - what do people want in messaging apps? GIF keyboards? Stickers? E2E encryption? Photo filters? Video messages?

A high churn rate is bad for federation - federation requires a spec, and specs are like unit tests. You don't want to write them in the experimentation phase before you know what you're building.

Over time the churn will slow down (this is happening already) and we'll probably see a standardish set of decent messaging features that everyone wants. (Good notifications, emoji, photos, low battery consumption, e2e encryption and obviously a gif keyboard.)

When we know what we want it shouldn't be too hard to write a spec and start drumming up interest in some decent opensource federated servers and clients. Signal might be a great place to start - but I think we should wait another year or two. Even signal isn't stable enough yet.

(And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by JustSomeNobody on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:11PM (#13347635)
This has all kind of happened before with MSN, Yahoo, AOl, etc and the corporations have closed it all off again[0]. I'm not holding out hope for the future. I believe it will be all closed protocols and tightly tied to whatever platform owns the protocol.

[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by peterschroeder on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:20PM (#13347667)
In the book, 'The Lean Startup' author Eric Ries actually used this strategy for his messaging company IMVU. Essentially he wanted to do the same thing I am doing, but for MSN, Yahoo, Aim, etc. It ended up being a catastrophic fail in one of the most read books in the startup world. Can you blame anyone for not trying it?!

Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.

I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by peterschroeder on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:24PM (#13347687)
The features you mention all should stand the tale of time in the messaging world and I safe it's safe to assume we will incorporate all of them eventually.

Incredible insights on companies fighting for market share. This is leading to all of the innovation now, and soon the dust will settle. At which point, we can sweep in and offer something unique to the common user!

[ Parent | on HN ]