You're not missing anything. Most if not all of your concerns were voiced during the internal dogfooding phase and, as usual for G+ and Vic Gundotra, duly noted and ignored.
And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.
Yep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!
No, if you have a client connecting to Google's XMPP servers, your messages will not show up if the other user is only logged in on Hangouts. Hangouts ALSO can't send messages to an XMPP only user (even if Google is hosting the talk servers, as is the case for my Google Apps domains).
I think that's the entire issue. Those of us with our own xmpp servers can no longer talk to hangouts because we have to have an account with google. s2s is going away, and I really am not interested in creating yet another account on some external system so I can chat with everyone on the non-federated system.
Personally I'd love to see a community driven extension to XMPP, with its corresponding RFC, which would allow feature parity with Google's proprietary crap while keeping interoperability and federation, so people could give Google the finger on this one.
I've long dreamed of a resurgence in the open source community, attacking big media much as the community attacked Microsoft in the late 1990s. It's depressing that the PR machine has so thoroughly succeeded that most of those who still call themselves "geeks" now consider building throwaway hacks on big media services cooler and more meaningful than coordinated efforts to replace the services themselves (in the name of serving some ideals much greater than say, amateur entrepreneurialism).
Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with.
I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.
Free-as-in-freedom replacements for many services do exist. By and large nobody knows about them, perhaps because the community isn't unified on the issue like it was against Microsoft, as you point out. I'm not sure privately working toward cloning services is a good way out of this situation. :)
autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it.
You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.
Thanks for the link, will check it out. GNOME was the first environment I used that had cohesive e.g. system preferences across the environment, and later a consistent update process (if I remember it right, Ximian were the first to include an updater in GNOME).
Half the battle isn't producing the software, it's ticking all the boxes that make people "go cloud" in the first place – you never need to run software update for Google Docs, you simply don't need to care about it.
What I'd love to see is a Ximian-styled system where you could subscribe to some release cycle (bleeding edge, 6 months behind, long term support), and behind the scenes a vast team of idealist monkeys worked to provide some of that cloud comfort – at the very lest, security updates.
The concept can be extended to quite elaborate proportions. But the low hanging fruit - let an admin create user accounts, let users login painlessly, and figure out how to make updates work safely & painlessly - and I believe half the war would already be won.
As others have noted, the pieces are already (mostly) there, they just need to be put together properly. FreedomBox is one effort in this direction, and they've already got an eye on XMPP, at least for chat. I don't know about extending it, but that is where I would start. IIRC, XMPP was created in response to the last time chat was balkanized; remember ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc, etc, etc?
Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking that I'm very optimistic about. You can message me at https://elimisteve.tent.is (sign up at tent.is).
The Netflix competitor is paid Youtube channels, except it only works in a few countries and it's not as good as Netflix.
Google has bet everything on social and are creating these satellite services to fuel G+ usage and adoption. You won't see anything revolutionary coming out of GOOG for a while.
I currently use Spotify and there is no way I'll be switching to a Google product. In fact I'm trying to reduce my dependence on Google products.
There is no successor to Reader, it's gone. Forever. Babel (Hangouts) is not theoretical, is very real and has been leaked already. It's just a walled garden (they threw XMPP away and went with their own proprietary protocol) so I personally would steer clear from it.
UAE wealth and influence comes from oil, there is no fudging around that fact. And they do live in the 12th century in some respects, they're just doing it within the comfort of their 21st century homes, with their 21st century cars, weapons, and infrastructure. The UAE is a dictatorship with strong extremist religious convictions and a medieval social values system that can only be described as appalling.
These things don't go away simply because they're our "allies" or because criticizing extremist religious practices is frowned upon in the West.
You are probably mixing up UAE and Dubai. The UAE consists of 7 emirates, including the capital Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The GDP of Dubai is dependent on services, trade and a bit of industry, and they have little oil. Abu Dhabi is oil-rich. A big chunk of its GDP, and the net GDP of the UAE in general, is oil.
a) this comment is annoyingly simple minded and pretty plainly racist. ("Those people"? Really?)
b) with all the talk of un-warranted wiretaps, and the state of surveillance building up in the US/Europe, it's probably a bad time to throw stones
c) it's worth spending some time to investigate how "those" countries have had democracy deliberately crippled for decades by western powers needing puppet dictators to guarantee their flow of oil (try a YouTube search for "secrets of the seven sisters")
No they didn't. This is actually run by a third party as Google does not own these offices. FWIW Google has a pretty decent security team, although for some reason most of them are arrogant assholes (e.g. Tavis Ormandy)
