Quantcast
Channel: Hacker News 50
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 9433

Laurent Eschenauer | What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

$
0
0

Comments:"Laurent Eschenauer | What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?"

URL:http://eschnou.com/entry/whats-next-google--dropping-smtp-support--62-24930.html


A company that was the cheerleader of the open web is rapidly turning its back on every single open standard they once championned. Their latest move, announced yesterday at Google I/O, appears to be closing XMPP server-to-server federation

 

It is only a natural next step in a process started a while ago. Here is a quick, and probably not exhaustive recap:

  • Google+ has no open RSS output, hence no PuSH support, no write API, in fact it has absolutely nothing open
  • Google Reader is scrapped, along with RSS support within Chrome
  • WebDav for Google Calendar is dropped in favor of their proprietary API
  • XMPP is dropped, while 3 years ago it was at the core of their Wave efforts
If they continue with this trend, then why not drop support for SMTP (and thus email federation)? When @aaronparecki.com posted the following picture a few months ago, I smiled. Today I wonder if this could actually ever happen.

This is what email would have looked like if it were invented in the Web 2.0 era. By aaronparecki.com

The good news is, we do not need Google to build the open web for us. We are developpers, and hacking the future is what we do best. So, time to wake up and start building alternatives. For those interested, the following movements are worth a look:

And beyond these movements, a lot of really cool open source projects which can become real alternatives to some of the Google monopolies.

Don't hesitate to comment, share your thoughts, or a link to an open project you are working on.

 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 9433

Trending Articles