empathy vs gtalk

[LunaticHiatus]

You know, I really see no point to keep supporting empathy. I think it would be better to get gtalk working with yahoo and msn since gtalk has video, audio, voip, and file transfers working flawless, while empathy is good for pretty much only messaging.

[gnomeuser]

Empathy builds upon Telepathy which is extendable and designed to support multiple protocols. Google Talk is XMPP (Google Talk is XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) only.

Adding support to the Google Talk application would also be impossible as it is closed source, not to mention the whole idea is.. well daft.

Telepathy is what you want to invest in, and actually.. we are, Collabora e.g. have 2 people working full time on Empathy ever since it was picked as the default in GNOME and various distributions including Ubuntu. The progress has been very promising with new support and features arriving regularly. Telepathy also extends beyond IM/VoIP scenerios, e.g. you can look in detail at the Telepathy tubes and the integration it allows for sharing in applications like Banshee or for use cases such as desktop sharing.

What you propose is guided by poor to non-existant understanding of the technology involved. Sorry, but it has no redeeming qualities as an informed idea and is clearly not researched the slightest.

[LunaticHiatus]

Empathy builds upon Telepathy which is extendable and designed to support multiple protocols. Google Talk is XMPP (Google Talk is XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) only.

Adding support to the Google Talk application would also be impossible as it is closed source, not to mention the whole idea is.. well daft.

Telepathy is what you want to invest in, and actually.. we are, Collabora e.g. have 2 people working full time on Empathy ever since it was picked as the default in GNOME and various distributions including Ubuntu. The progress has been very promising with new support and features arriving regularly. Telepathy also extends beyond IM/VoIP scenerios, e.g. you can look in detail at the Telepathy tubes and the integration it allows for sharing in applications like Banshee or for use cases such as desktop sharing.

What you propose is guided by poor to non-existant understanding of the technology involved. Sorry, but it has no redeeming qualities as an informed idea and is clearly not researched the slightest.

I did not mean financially invest, I meant have an invested interest. I.e. packaging it with ubuntu. I thought empathy would have a future, but while your pointing out the trouble of the google talk client being closed source, I'm more concerned with the yahoo, msn protocols being closed. Google talk would encourage users to switch to the open protocol xmpp, while empathy encouraged the closed protocols of yahoo and msn.

Furthermore, its a usibility issue. People coming to ubuntu wanting to use there favorite messenger, being forced to use a third party client which crashes when you do anything more then messaging is just awful for the user experience and looks cheap and unprofessional

[Grenage]

empathy encouraged the closed protocols of yahoo and msn.

It does not encourage, it enables; others may wish to use a system that their friends use.


People coming to ubuntu wanting to use there favorite messenger

I imagine the that those who wish to use gtalk as their primary client are in the severe minority.


being forced to use a third party client which crashes when you do anything more...

Forced?

[LunaticHiatus]

It does not encourage, it enables; others may wish to use a system that their friends use.



I imagine the that those who wish to use gtalk as their primary client are in the severe minority.



Forced?

Gtalk is compatible with aim, so that's a large portion.
I'm not going to go into the semantics of forced or encoraged vs enables.
My point is that with empathy you are using third party software which barely works. With gtalk your using first party software which works. When you present ubuntu to a customer/user do you want to show off a messenger which works with many platforms that barely works or software which works with a couple of platforms which works perfectly.
Empathy, despite its potential, presently does not work any better then pidgin and appears cheap and even if they do get the video protocol working, how much does it take for yahoo or msn to tweak how they handletheir protocols to break compatibility?

[Grenage]

Gtalk is compatible with aim, so that's a large portion.
I'm not going to go into the semantics of forced or encoraged vs enables.
My point is that with empathy you are using third party software which barely works. With gtalk your using first party software which works. When you present ubuntu to a customer/user do you want to show off a messenger which works with many platforms that barely works or software which works with a couple of platforms which works perfectly.
Empathy, despite its potential, presently does not work any better then pidgin and appears cheap and even if they do get the video protocol working, how much does it take for yahoo or msn to tweak how they handletheir protocols to break compatibility?

I'm all for people moving over to open protocols; I personally have a gtalk account, along with three other types. When MSN's protocol does change, it only takes abut a day for the patch, but it could be a pain.

That said, I have no problems with empathy; it never crashes for me, neither does Pidgin.

[LunaticHiatus]

Empathy used to have little micophones for voice next to usernames which crashed anytime when pressed on my computers. (Not sure if it still has those) and when I say it only partially works, I mean it works only with messaging. I also question whether empathy will ever gain support with voice and video.

[Grenage]

Empathy used to have little micophones for voice next to usernames which crashed anytime when pressed on my computers. (Not sure if it still has those) and when I say it only partially works, I mean it works only with messaging. I also question whether empathy will ever gain support with voice and video.

Well if gnomeuser is correct that there are two full-time coders working on Telepathy, and I have no doubt that he is, development should be quite progressive.

[Paqman]

I also question whether empathy will ever gain support with voice and video.

Don't know about you, but everybody I know uses Skype for voice and video now anyway. It's like Facebook, once a certain critical mass of people start using one communication service, it becomes pointless to use anything else.

[Grenage]

Don't know about you, but everybody I know uses Skype for voice and video now anyway. It's like Facebook, once a certain critical mass of people start using one communication service, it becomes pointless to use anything else.

I don't know anyone who uses Skype, but that probably says a lot about my social circle. ;)

[LunaticHiatus]

Don't know about you, but everybody I know uses Skype for voice and video now anyway. It's like Facebook, once a certain critical mass of people start using one communication service, it becomes pointless to use anything else.

Have you used skype for linux? Its awful and never updates. Think of gtalk as the possible facetime for linux. People love facetime on mac despite the fact you can only use it with other mac users. Having one good messaging service is important and presently, that's gtalk and empathy has had fulltime developers for awhile now. It seems they are more concerned about things like security implementations then compatibility with protocols

[Paqman]

Have you used skype for linux? Its awful and never updates.

Yep, use it all the time (which was kind of implied by my post...). It's alright IMO. Certainly does the job competently.

As I said, it doesn't matter whether any particular communication channel is any good, it's just about who else uses it. If everyone you want to talk to is using a proprietary protocol with a terrible client then you're stuck using it too.

Just look at IRC, which is pretty horrendous to use, but if you want to chat with open source geeks, that's the way you do it.

[LunaticHiatus]

Yep, use it all the time (which was kind of implied by my post...). It's alright IMO. Certainly does the job competently.

As I said, it doesn't matter whether any particular communication channel is any good, it's just about who else uses it. If everyone you want to talk to is using a proprietary protocol with a terrible client then you're stuck using it too.

Just look at IRC, which is pretty horrendous to use, but if you want to chat with open source geeks, that's the way you do it.

Granted, but I think it would be wise to pull an apple and have gtalk and empathy. (Like trillian and facetime) and if gtalk gains more compatibility, go with that and if gtalk does. Go with that. In the meantime, I hate showing off empathy as the primary way of sending messages. It looks like a hack then it does something to show off. Gtalk is something that you can sho off.

[Grenage]

Granted, but I think it would be wise to pull an apple and have gtalk and empathy. (Like trillian and facetime) and if gtalk gains more compatibility, go with that and if gtalk does. Go with that. In the meantime, I hate showing off empathy as the primary way of sending messages. It looks like a hack then it does something to show off. Gtalk is something that you can sho off.

Then it's probably worth asking Google if they have a Linux gtalk client in the pipeline.

[LunaticHiatus]

Then it's probably worth asking Google if they have a Linux gtalk client in the pipeline.

They have a linux client that used gears but gears has been dropped. Its mostly web based and the codec for voice/video has a linux version (have to, chrome os is based on ubuntu and they use ubuntu in house) you could just put a hot link in the menu or as an icon to the the website (which looks like a native client anyhow) that's what I do when I set it up for people anyway.