What really disappoints me about the current crop of VC funded messaging apps is that none of them care very strongly about user privacy. Even apps that claim to keep your messages "encrypted" are closed source and don't include details about their encryption techniques.

There are open source encrypted messaging apps like ChatSecure [1][2], and TextSecure [3] but they lack some of the modern vanity features that users expect and they can seem difficult to setup for an average user.

1. https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS

2. https://github.com/guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid

3. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/

It's amazing the most crucial applications in our day to day lives are absolutely awful. Why is there not a great messenger application available, that's simple, well designed, and secures our data? Why is there not a proper alternative to Skype, offering free group video calling, while protecting our privacy? Why does e-mail feel so dated and sloppy? I sent out a handful of e-mails last week, my mail server said they were sent, but none of the recipients received them. I sent another message to a friend the other month, and she missed it because it went to her spam folder. Why do I even receive spam? I know you can setup a whitelist only, but why isn't this more of a standard, where I build a contact list with friends, and we can leave messages back and forth, receive proper confirmation they're received, read, etc. It would be nice if I could login to my e-mail, and see I have 20 friends, 10 sites that are able to message me, and then manage that list by adding or removing.

We have some incredible apps and software out there, but the most important ones are those lacking the most.

> I know you can setup a whitelist only, but why isn't this more of a standard, where I build a contact list with friends, and we can leave messages back and forth, receive proper confirmation they're received, read, etc. It would be nice if I could login to my e-mail, and see I have 20 friends, 10 sites that are able to message me, and then manage that list by adding or removing.

This actually is pretty much how Facebook messaging works.

It exists: BBM.

ChatSecure is a crashy mess, TextSecure is android only and requires a phone number, you can't use tablets. I'm looking forward to the CryptoCat clients that are supposedly being released this month, it might be an actual usable mobile OTR client for both iOS and Android.

Not encryption, but: Kik does not save messages on their server. After some # of messages (100?), they disappear in the client as well.

sorry for the self promotion.I am working on wrinq a meesaging service that values privacy. You can check it out here http://www.wrinq.com/

sorry for the self promotion. I am working on a messagin service that values privacy. Check out wrinq

http://www.wrinq.com/

A pretty relevant article about what myself and temas are working on now: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-...

IMO, interop/federation is going to be a tremendous long-term effort and include many standards, but is definitely feasible, inevitable even. There's a lot of innovation happening in messaging again thanks to mobile, we just need to start taking the best of what we've all learned already and work together to improve everyone's stack collectively.

Layer seems interesting but I think the reason XMPP ultimately succeeded was because of federation and a healthy open source ecosystem. We are drafting a federated, minimal knowledge push server design for privacy-minded chat apps: https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-Push-Server/tree/ma... (a little out of date)

Everythign old is new again. Remember the days of MSN vs ICQ vs AIM etc etc etc?

Yes... Why can't people just download Trillian and stop giving Snapchat and Whatsapp billions of dollars. le sigh

SnapChat makes sense because it's got the whole deletion-driven ephemral images model. That doesn't really require its own protocol, though.

Now I'm fantasizing about some kind of extensible system that allows that kind of special messaging. Making a cross-platform system for that would be hard. HTML5+JS message bodies (omg security!)? Plugin architecture? Idunno.

TIL what XMPP stands for. Neat! I thought Google said they dropped it because they had trouble extending it to do the things they wanted with Hangouts... when the whole point of the protocol was extensibility? That's unfortunate.

Because that kind of always-on chat will destroy your battery.

Well, Trillian can't do what Snapchat does, and no user is giving it any money, so this seems pretty irrelevant.

RIP MSN. When I was a teenager I used to spend all day in a group chat with some friends. I think the feature I miss the most is the custom emoticons.

I've since moved onto Skype's group chat, but nothing I've comes close to MSN. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

It's funny, I have a WP7 phone and the lack an MS-blessed messaging system sticks out. You use Facebook account if you want to send messages through the Internet instead of SMS using the built-in features of the OS.

They bought Skype after the OS was created and never gave it the kind of deep bindings into the OS that other popular social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) got.

Has everyone forgotten about IRC? A cross platform IRC app would be sweet.

All of these apps are essentially doing the same things - sending text, pictures, and status notifications. It's a hard sell, but we really need a standard like email or xmpp to allow interoperability.

Unfortunately they're no incentive for interoperability. In fact there's a strong disincentive for it.

The value in these companies is the captive audience and the network effect that makes users sticky. There's very little money in producing a commodity chat client (a la Pidgin or Adium).

It is in all of these companies' interests to not work with each other, as their only value is the size and exclusivity of their userbase.

Personally I just SMS now. I'm sick and tired of installing apps just to talk to that one friend who uses it, especially when SMS works just fine.

Google killed Talk (XMPP), replaced it with hangouts, and is suddenly offering to replace my SMS app and send them all through hangouts. I get that this works as a direct competitor to Messages, but I'd really rather just see Jabber or something like it here.

I agree. I'm pretty much okay with any standard, as long as it's, well 'standard'. It just seems a bit ridiculous to have all these different apps essentially doing the same thing, but with different front end interfaces, and unable to communicate with each other.

XMPP is standard. Grab a client for the platform of your choice [0], open an account on ddg.gg (duckduckgo's xmpp server), and you're done. I personnally use pidgin on the desktop and chatsecure on Android.

The only thing XMPP is lacking is marketing. Multi-billion-dollars-level marketing; shouldn't be too hard to do, right ?

[0] http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/

XMPP is not technically well-suited to mobile devices. It was designed with a base-level assumption that any client will maintain a constant TCP connection in order to receive messages. This doesn't fit well with mobile devices, which spend most of their time 'off' and try to have as little software running concurrently as possible in order to save battery life. Some mobile XMPP clients have come up with various clever workarounds, but all of them are hacks. For example, by keeping the 'real' XMPP connection open indefinitely on a remote, third-party server, and then communicating with the mobile app using a custom proprietary protocol that doesn't have this assumption.

A new protocol is needed. In fact, just the other day there was a story on HN where the original creator of XMPP said the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6849755 The merits of his proposed solution are another matter, though.

So, BOSH [0], aka XMPP-over-HTTP ? Originally intended to allow XMPP in the browser, it turned out [1] to be solving a lot of other problems, including the frequent disconnections of a smartphone.

[0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0206.html [1] https://metajack.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/xmpp-is-better-wit...

We are working on a federated, protocol agnostic push server design here: https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-Push-Server/tree/ma...

XMPP never got to the point where it was good enough at video, audio, or even large chatrooms, and so other chat clients took the initiative.

There are plenty of reasons XMPP succeeded where it succeeded and failed where it failed.

I don't recall if this made the HN front page, but there was some news this week of interest: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-...

edit: ugh, jer beat me to it by hours

It is so easy to whip one of these apps together, you could do it in a few days.

For a while I was heavily using Adium, with many extensions, theme packs, and Whatsapp. I'm now just using Messages on mac/iphone and much prefer it. Bells and whistles are only interesting for so long. Text and emails, on computer and phone beats any long feature list.

Same for music, I had customised Winamp and another one I can't remember the name of, but now I'm back to iTunes. I do need a new podcast client now that iTunes makes it difficult to know which episodes are downloaded. Any suggestions?

Oh where or where is the IETF. This is the kind of thing that needs a standard for the message content in a way that is extensible. Maybe plain HTML/CSS is sufficient for most stuff. Does anything from the Jabber world work for this?

I hate the million inboxes I have. It would be nice if you could at least use one application to manage all the inboxes of all the devices.

Seems like Google Wave was a good first attempt at an open-source standard that could have worked here.

Google is making a play too, with Hangouts now handling SMS. Although the people I've talked to who try that hate it, because it often sends a chat message when they wanted to text the person. Texts are just seen as much more personal and immediate where are chat texts aren't much different from email.

Maybe they should put a big SMS label on it so you know, or put "SMS 000-000-0000" at the top to signify it's an SMS chat rather than the Hangout. (This is how it is today, btw)

There's a toggle at the top of the app that lets you choose whether you want to send your contacts an SMS or an IM.

I've been using the Hangouts app for a few weeks now and am pretty impressed with it so far. It's become my go-to messenger. All of my friends usually keep their Gchat open during work, so switching seamlessly between chat and SMS has been a pretty good experience so far.

The app, though, is a little slow to load and send SMS's, but not enough to warrant disuse.

It's sad none of them offers anything interesting. Snapchat was novel for 5 seconds, and now it's just old and stupid...