Toward federated services

... and they abandoned it almost as soon as they released it, or at least the official google clients didn't actually use libjingle as released.

> Yet no independent support for XMPP really materialized and all the third-party XMPP clients are shit. So Google after 10 years or so simply decided to drop XMPP.

Google dropped XMPP because a federated IM system no longer fit their goals of building a walled garden (ie Google+) to compete with Apple and Facebook, and even before that they didn't actually care about adhering to the standards they themselves helped define. (ie libjingle) It was an entirely political decision; there was no technical basis for what they did.

As for "no independent support" -- by this you mean the other big IM players, that had a vested interest in maintaining their own walled gardens and lock-in? Especially when several of them (most notably facebook) actually used bog-standard XMPP on the client side.

Meanwhile, if by "all third-party clients are shit" you mean that said third-party clients not properly implementing (ie reverse-engineering) the nonstandard quirks of said first-party clients and services... and by non-standard I mean deliberately ignoring stuff that was already well-defined and rolling their own. (push notifications are the main thing that come to mind; Both Google and Facebook rolled their own that happened to map to their backends rather than shimming their backends to deal with the actual standard)

I run my own XMPP server, and I can interact with Google Business users who haven't been automatically "upgraded" to Hangouts. Tons of people and corporations still use XMPP.

I was never a fan of XMPP, even before it was standardized. But I've been running my own server Jabber/XMPP server for a long time, because not only is it widely supported by FOSS, it's the only non-proprietary game in town.

Perhaps you meant that neither Microsoft nor Apple adopted XMPP. Well, they're certainly not going to interoperate with Hangouts, either.

"third-party XMPP clients are shit"

Are you kidding me? You're saying proprietary, HTML-based chat clients are better than clients like Adium?

libjingle never took off because people, especially early adopters like developers, aren't particularly interested in voice and video with their IM. Skype and, to some extent, Facetime dominate the real-time AV space. And while Skype also has IM, have you noticed that it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as Microsoft's or Google's IM usage? For whatever reason, AV and IM are like water and oil at the moment. The fact that the tide has turned toward SMS suggests that this isn't going to change anytime soon.

Heck, even Google Voice is being abandoned as a separate product. Neither decision had anything to do with technical deficiencies. It's a product management decision. Google simply decided to double-down on their walled garden, hoping to leverage the success of Android and the ubiquity of GTalk to solidify their lead in the messaging (IM, voice, video) space, partly as a strategy to compete with Facebook. It is, after all, being done under the Google+ umbrella.

I'm not saying Google is evil. I love lots of Google products, especially Android, Chrome, and Chromebook. I just also enjoy my freedom, at least as much freedom as I can manage to defend. I've run my own web and mail servers for nearly 15 years now, and I'd be horrified of any world where I had no choice but to entrust those things to some third-party.

Loosely speaking, it's like the difference between renting and owning a home. Renting makes a lot of sense for many people, but there's more to the equation than money or convenience. For example, not only a sense of privacy and autonomy, but actual privacy and autonomy (even if it's less than it seems).