When Google announced that it was consolidating its Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) instant messaging and video-conferencing services into Google Hangouts, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noticed that Google had also sharply diminished “support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber.)” Google has since admitted that it is indeed shrinking its support for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

XMPP was meant to enable users from one Internet communication network to be able to talk to a friend or co-worker on another such network. So, for example, an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user could talk to his co-worker on Google Talk and vice-versa. It sounds great, so what went wrong? 

Google moves away from the XMPP open-messaging standard. More >