Apple embraces 'n' extends messaging

The best thing about iMessages...

.... is some message notification privacy. For the first time, you can disable the popup box of death telling everybody you have a text message. Not only that, you can tell iMessages not to display a badge to indicate you have a new message.

I appreciate that to many that turning off these notifications (and you can do it across all types of notifications) is not helpful, but for some, it is a holy grail.

In other areas, iMessages means that you can communicate in text form from your iPad (it would be nice if you can send text messages from your iPad if your SIM has texting enabled) and I bet this will be the same for iChat when Lion is released.

The silo will then be complete.

XMPP?

Is Mr. Orlowski familiar with XMPP?

That would appear to be the protocol he so bemoans the lack of.

And it is in somewhat widespread use (it is powering Google Talk for instance, and the gtalk servers federate nicely with other XMPP servers... of which there are a multitude), so it's not like it's one of these wierd unused protocols that a bunch of neckbeards are bemoaning the fact that the unwashed (the other unwashed, not themselves) and ignorant do not use it.

(Headmaster: about to remonstrate with Mr Orlowski for not doing his homework)

Open Standards and Privacy are not opposites...

... if Apple opened this protocol to other makers (note, I did not say "open source it"), and allowed any maker of hardware to write a client for it, then fine; otherwise, put it back in the bin marked AppleLink. A better MMS would be cool. It doesn't have to be Apple's solution either. I'm open to anything that would have the broad reach MMS does, but work better. But it must allow me to talk to my friends, regardless of what they're using.

The problem is that, like FaceTime, this is just another closed, Apple-to-Apple technology; and we've been here before with the email wars of the 1990s. The reason RFC-822 (and successors) and POP3 won back then wasn't because it was the best; it was because you could send a mail to someone and be pretty sure it'd arrive saying more or less what you'd written. Interoperability is king in communications. This is why GSM took off, and CDMA didn't.

Interoperable and "Open" don't mean the same thing as "Public" or "Shared". There are open standards for point-to-point messaging that do not expose their information to scraping by the likes of Google: XMPP (Jabber) is one that springs to mind. Just because Google (a major provider of XMPP) records everything you send on GMail Chat, it does not follow that the protocol itself does this - Google own the relay server, that's why they're recording the info.

(Incidentally, the same thing happens to your SMS traffic; but this time it's a telecoms company, licenced by your government, that does the snooping - to me, that's better than having a corporation doing it; Americans generally think the opposite...)

BBM is not a good precedent, because a. there's not much of a financial barrier to owning a BlackBerry*, b. Large companies issued them to employees en-masse, c. iPhone owners already use open systems like Twitter for these features.

A communications service is only as good as the number of other people it can help you reach. Something that only 20% of "smartphone" users (smartphones being only 30% of the market anyway) can use isn't much of a draw...

* don't fall for the line about "FREE" contract pricing: over 70% of mobile customers in the EU are on Pay-as-you-Go plans, and €600 for a phone is beyond most customers' means or willingness to pay.

It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?

While Twitter and Facebook may seem invincible today - as does Apple - I wonder how long before they join the ranks of MySpace and GeoCities?

Realistically, if we were starting out from scratch, then we'd never have designed the current POP, SMTP, IMAP methods the way they are today ... but we're stuck with them for the moment. I don't see the harm in Apple, RIM etc trying out new systems and protocols - if they are worthy then they will be adopted and extended ... much as POP and SMTP have been. These protocols and designed were - in the beginning - as much products of the ivory towers as anything that seems to be proposed at present.

A Blade Runner quote from Gaff because, well the movie and the positions that the characters find themselves in just seems to be more prescient as the years pass.

Untitled 1

In the email world there's POP, IMAP, and SMTP and the rest can be bludgeoned into some kind of interoperability with those one way or another and it's also in vendors of proprietary solutions' interests that that happens.

In the IM world the battle to protect protocols has basically been given up by their owners, there's interoperability agreements and XMPP.

In the mobile world up to featurephone level there's SMS, MMS, and video calling and everything uses them. There are sync programs which back up this data onto the computer and there are MMS to email gateways and back again.

Then there's Apple which have made Facetime and iMessage to replace their previous iChat (itself AIM), video calling and MMS. The reason why they've done this is unclear apart from perhaps not invented here syndrome.

There are always proprietary and always open solutions. Some proprietary solutions sink without trace, other commercially successful ones carry on and if they do carry on then either their proprietors provide some kind of interoperability or other people do (e.g. Samba). And in no case does the choice of protocol affect the ability of a court or government to demand that the data on the server be handed over.

The fact that Apple have invented Facetime and iMessage doesn't protect people's privacy any more than video calling or MMS, it's just a little more Jobsian lock-in into Apple's ecosystem to persuade you not to leave.

Antitrust shenanigans

What is interesting is all this walled garden movement, evangelised by Apple today will inevitably lead to some sort of antitrust suit.

In regard to iMessage in particular, SMS needs to die or become free. The one good thing about SMS is it's interoperable amongst any mobile device. It's problem is that paying 8-20p for a 160 character message in today's connected world is ludicrous. It still has a life if it became universally free. But that's also leads to a problem with these anachronistic dinosaurs aka the carrier networks believing they are anything more than a big fat dumb data pipe.

iMessage is also a direct copy of BBM. Problem is that the iPhone doesn't have any credibility as a secure device in front of the BlackBerry, and aside from being free, that's also a major factor in people's use of BBM. Furthermore it's the kids who are using BBM more than anyone else - a 16 year old son of a friend of mine actually was given a choice of what phone to get, including an iPhone and he chose a BlackBerry purely due to BBM.

However, as the article discusses, this is about the walled garden versus the open standard. This is irrelevant. Any standard - open or otherwise - isn't worth the paper it's written on if it's not adopted, and in the case of an open standard the onus is even greater as it needs widescale adoption to tilt the point of critical mass. Skype is as much of a 'standard' VoIP protocol as SIP is, though one's closed and one open.

It's more about antitrust and specifically, vendor lock in. Apple will eventually get done for antitrust - this a given and a matter of time - but it does require those damned regulators with their snouts in the corporate trough to wake up! At the moment, there's only a very tiny amount of self-regulation where vendor lock-ins upset a bigger player - see the Adobe v Apple fight over Flash v HTML5 - even though it's Google who stands to gain the most from HTML5 being widely adopted.

Vendor lock in is a rife problem in the tech/telecoms industry and somewhat a form of modus operandi of giant tech / telco companies. But it just shows how and why there needs to be regulation in the form of a new set of dentures for the various Competition Commissions around the world.

IMAP Doesn't Cut It

I'm going to defend Apple on this one.

First of all, we ALREADY have a situation in which large amounts of email no longer travel over POP or IMAP between server and client. It's called GMail. And the protocol involved is whatever the Googlers hacked up to run between the JavaScript GMail front-end and the Google GMail back-end. Just because no one ever noticed this as a proprietary protocol doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

GMail's proprietary protocol was created for good reason --- because POP and IMAP don't do what's needed to make the GMail client work well. If Apple wishes to create a compelling email client that can compete with GMail, then they need to do the same. RIM did the same thing as well --- ever notice how much better email works on a Blackberry than on an IMAP-compliant Android phone? Again, it goes over Blackberry's proprietary protocol.

I don't blame Apple for doing this. I DO blame the standards people --- who have failed to come up with any better protocols, even 5+ years after GMail and Blackberry have shown us how short the existing ones really fall.

Silos

You have to take a good look at what modern silos actually are to realize the recent growth is a perfectly natural extension of free and open standards.

The silo nature is only in the proprietary display end of things. The layer of obfuscation to hide from the masses that there is actually nothing new and no cost incurred worthy of the M$ being charged.

In the background the databases, storage formats, layout architectures and communication channels are almost all open standards. When you merger your mega-silo with smaller startups, you want to be able to transfer their data into your silo quickly and easily after all. When both are using the same open standards the costs are minimal and return on investments are as high as marketing can charge for the "upgrade" to newer and flashier frontend bling.

When there is some ways developed to do things more efficiently the big silos are all pushing to get their way standardized. Forcing their competition to support that method and soften themselves up for the taking.

It is balancing on a two-edged sword. The Next Big Thing is just as likely to come out of some random idealist geek than out of a silo business.

... mines the one with the token-key data wallet in the pocket.

Technically ...

If 'mother' is half a word then "embraces 'n' extends" is .67 words. Couldn't sleep, had to clear that up.

Actually, I *do* care.

Some of my friends communicate with BBM, but I don't have a blackberry.

Some use Facebook, which I hate. I'm losing touch with those friends.

Some use twitter, including me. Those are the friends I'm best in touch with.

Some even use email and phone, one even post, but I tend to forget to reply.

And you know what? This drives me up the wall. Social technology is meant to organise us and bring us together, not throw up barriers. The lack of interoperability is sheer petty bloody-mindedness on the vendor's parts. It'd be the easiest thing in the world to make BBM and iMessage talk to each other.

Is it just me?

Does it look to anyone else like Andrew Orlowski uses the flimsiest excuses to bring up his weird little obsessions? Somehow he worked his strange fascination with some kind of human hive cult into an article about an IM system. I think he should write ALL the articles from now on.

For example this -

"Oracle has released a cross-platform update for Java that addresses 17 vulnerabilities in the ubiquitous software platform.

All 17 vulnerabilities might be abused to inject code into vulnerable systems, and all but one affect how Java Runtime Environment client software runs in browsers."

- would become this -

"Oracle has released a cross-platform update for Java that addresses 17 vulnerabilities in the ubiquitous software platform.

All 17 vulnerabilities might be abused to inject code into vulnerable systems, to the dismay of David Icke and his fellow reptiloid conspiracy nuts."

- which I think we can all agree is much better.