Saturday, October 23, 2010

Apple: iChat vs. FaceTime (XMPP?)

In his recent keynote Steve Jobs announce FaceTime for OS X as something new. But didn't we all wonder, why they didn't just extend iChat to allow us to talk to somebody using FaceTime on the iPad or iPhone? I would rather prefer that.

Actually I would like to know, whether FaceTime and iChat are XMPP base or whether Apple prefers to invent proprietary protocols. Even “embrace and extend” would be better than that. Hmm, I don't really mean “embrace, extend and extinguish”, but that's what “embrace and extend” sadly redirects to on Wikipedia. I mean: does the world really need yet another messaging standard? There is SIP around, and it should actually get replaced by XMPP, but that's not really going to happen for the next 15 years, I assume. Google and Facebook employ XMPP for Google Talk resp. the Facebook chatting facility, and I like that.

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