Google: Stop using xmpp chat protocol due to lack of interest

Google has issued a statement for the end of support for the xmpp chat protocol in its new chat service Hangouts. According to the internet giant, other companies showed too little interest in supporting the open standard.

Google states that it is xmpp protocol, also known as Jabber, has supported and promoted for years, but has received little industry acclaim for widely implementing the communication protocol. According to the internet giant, a standard that is little supported is not useful and the company also states that the xmpp technology has not been sufficiently modernized. Based on this, Google would feel compelled to drop support for xmpp with the release of its new chat service Hangouts, the company said. know in a response to PC World.

The response comes after Google has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The organization criticizes the decision to drop xmpp support and says that users will be the victims of this: according to the EFF, it is bad for users’ privacy if one company manages the chat servers. With xmpp support, it is possible to set up your own chat servers while still being able to communicate with Hangouts users.

Google recently released Hangouts as a replacement for its previously released chat services, including Talk. The latter received support for xmpp in 2006. It is known that in the long run more features will have to be integrated into Hangouts: Google spoke about support for SMS and calls via the Voice service.