Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.
They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.
Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html
> Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.
How does this imply he has any connection to Meta? Companies license patents all the time.
> Before Haiket, Alex founded a number of technology start-ups and helped develop innovative voice solutions for Facebook and Google.
At the very least, I think it's safe to say he has some connections within Meta that he utilised for this purpose. He's definitely not a complete outsider whose startup (with no actual product) just happened to be picked by Meta.
By the time this back-and-forth reaches its end, these two will find some shady b2b customers and are gonna be touted as "successful European startups".
People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available.
No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
After talking to your third and fourth friend and explaining which twenty menus they need to navigate through to enable this, you'll give up.
This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.
This is like "web installs" on Android. Navigate the complex menus (step 1) to toggle the setting. Then for every APK, find the file (step 2 - not everyone can do this), say okay to the "scare wall" (step 3), the permissions screen (step 4), and beware any app defaults. Let's hope Google doesn't negatively rank the app in the SERPs. (And let's not forget the fact that Apple doesn't even allow this.)
Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.
Every single one of these big tech companies needs to be muzzled and broken up. And as an innovation, I wouldn't even suggest partitioning them by product vertical, but rather creating 5 clones of each business entity that have to scramble to compete from day one on every business line. Ma Bell style. Forced mitosis.
This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.
And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.
Lina Khan didn't move fast enough, then she was shown the door.
Maybe the EU will persist where the US FTC/DOJ could not?
Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?
> For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.
Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?
I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?
Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.
Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion
(The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)
"BirdyChat" just sounds childish.
Maybe I'm in the minority, who knows, but project names are important. I've seen so many posts of people dismissing projects just because of the name...
I agree - "Birdy" is the name used with infants when talking about birds, or is a bird toy that photographers use to distract people ... which is a bit too close to the truth, perhaps.
To me it also suggests 'a toy version of Twitter'; and Twitter already had enough negativity around it for me.
Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.
That might just be me, not sure.
It looks like it's focused on business but its name sounds childish. If I mentioned that in a corporate meeting people would just laugh at me, I don't think it helps their case.
Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.
When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.
But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.
Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.
I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.
I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.
It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.
A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.
I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.
This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.
Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.
Since the purpose of these apps is literally putting you in contact with other people, you tend to use the same app/social network most of your friends and family are using.
This is not necessarily true for platforms you use to find new people, but even then, you're going to use the websites/apps people with your interests are using.
The way I read it is along the lines of Mike Masnick's protocols not platforms.
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
The UX is still pretty bad, with many rough edges around sign-in and device verification. The message/encryption story has gotten better (it's been a long time since I've gotten spurious errors about being unable to decrypt messages), but it's still not particularly easy to use. Performance-wise I've found it to still be fairly bad; loading messages after I've been offline takes a noticeable amount of pause, something I rarely see with other messaging platforms.
On the plus side, Matrix does have many chat features that many people like (or even require) in a chat platform, like formatting, emojis, message reactions, threads, etc.
No thanks on that. I don't have time or energy for these things.
What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app.
And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make their own apps. Maybe it should be something the EU should put some more resource into it?
ICQ was also a proprietary chat protocol. The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it. Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party clients than AOL was toward Gaim's reverse-engineer of AIM's protocol, as you note. (Not to mention sending legal threats to the Gaim/Pidgin team to get them to change the name of the app.)
IRC was indeed king, when the internet was populated mostly by technically-savvy folks who could deal with its rough edges. (For example, you probably forget how annoying it was to get file transfer working over IRC; sometimes it was just impossible to do, depending on clients and NAT conditions and so forth. Things like ChanServ and NickServ were creative, but inelegant, hacks, functions that the protocol should handle directly.) And consider that IRC has more or less not changed at all in decades. I am a technically-savvy user, and I gave up on IRC, switching to Matrix for those types of chats, which has its own rough edges, but at least has modern features to sorta kinda make up for it. (Otherwise I generally use Signal, or, if I can't get people to switch, Whatsapp.) I want to be able to do simple formatting, react to messages, edit messages, etc. And most people in the world seem to want those things too. IRC has stagnated and doesn't meet most people's needs.
But I absolutely agree in that I want open protocols too. It's just hard to fight against big corporations with endless development, design, and marketing budgets. And those big corporations are not incentivized to build or support open protocols; in fact they are incentivized to do the opposite. As much as the EU does get some things wrong, I think we need strong governments to force companies to open up their protocols and systems for interoperability, and to stamp down hard on them when they comply maliciously, as Apple and Meta does. The EU is pretty much the only entity that comes close to doing that. I really wish the US was more forward-thinking, but our government is full of oligarchs and oligarch-wannabes these days, thanks to the lack of any meaningful campaign finance limits. At least California (where I live) has some GDPR-inspired privacy legislation, but I think something like the EU's DMA is still too "out there" for us here, unfortunately.
Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet.
So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!
Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.
But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.
I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.
So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.
Whatsapp on the other hand does not show SMS messages (Which is a design choice that makes sense from a security perspective I guess, not saying it's wrong.)
iMessage is not open, and Apple fights efforts by other companies (e.g. Beeper) to interoperate with it.
The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.
I can count 3 mistakes here:
1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)
2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.
3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.
On the second screen of the app there is already an infuriating bug: they ask to give your work email because than you go hire in priority on their invite-only waiting list. So you type in your email again and again and again, alternating between all your emails, but you keep returning to the form asking for your work email. You check those emails to see if they send you something to activate your account but nothing. Exasperated you try the only other button, sign up with private email instead. Guess that works, because you leave the infinite loop. But than zilch, nada, nothing.
Don't these script-kiddies use their own app?