Some news on the death of MSN (holy shit skype uses XMPP)
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dx
May 8, 2013, 2:23:38 AM5/8/13
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Sup.
The reports of MSN's death have been greatly exaggerated. Here's the current situation, some of you may have heard of this already, but just to have a nice summary:
- The MSNP servers (the ones that start the connection by connecting to messenger.hotmail.com:1863 and send commands like "VER 1 MSNP15 CVR0" - in other words the original protocol) are still alive - some sources say they will disabled "some time next year"[1], apparently they talked directly to microsoft about this but there's nothing official.
- Only the official msn client stopped working, but not due to a server side limitation, and can be patched with tools of suspicious legitness. (note: all closed source windows apps are in the same legitness category)
- Third party clients still work.
- The skype client handles old MSN contacts too - and here's the interesting part: they aren't merged with the skype protocol, but behind the scenes skype creates an XMPP connection to xmpp.messenger.live.com with SSL and using OAuth2 for the login step.
So the connection using the horrible skype protocol only shows the skype contacts, and the connection to the msn XMPP server only shows MSN contacts.
The MSN XMPP server isn't new, it was part of the "messenger developer program", which they claim that will be discontinued after october 2013, but given that they've added an XMPP implementation to the skype client itself, it seems unlikely that this is just part of a transition, but that's just my guess. We don't really know what's going to happen with this.
Anyway here's some official api docs [2], and some extra info [3] (such as the fact that this server doesn't support federation, and that the OAuth2 implementation is extremely similar to facebook's xmpp)
Existing XMPP clients seem to be able to use this new server as long as they handle the OAuth2 step nicely, for example bitlbee seems to support it out of the box[4]. There's an implementation of a pidgin plugin[5] that aims to be a replacement of the old msn prpl but for now only extends the pidgin XMPP auth - the code[6] is approximately 200 lines with a few interesting comments. For example, it seems to mention a JSON REST api that can be used to get profile pictures. I can't help but feel that this is what MSN should have been since the beginning.
Okay that's it. I'm not sure how useful it is to implement only this in emesene right now, as MSNP still works. At least it seems to be the best option for accounts that did the migration to skype, but still want to use third party clients.
Here, have some sweet-ass footnote links:
[1] http://blog.trillian.im/?p=2684
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx
[3] http://blog.process-one.net/details_on_msns_xmpp_server/
[4] http://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoMsnXmpp
[5] http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-msn-xmpp/
[6] http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-msn-xmpp/source/browse/trunk/libmsnxmpp.c
The reports of MSN's death have been greatly exaggerated. Here's the current situation, some of you may have heard of this already, but just to have a nice summary:
- The MSNP servers (the ones that start the connection by connecting to messenger.hotmail.com:1863 and send commands like "VER 1 MSNP15 CVR0" - in other words the original protocol) are still alive - some sources say they will disabled "some time next year"[1], apparently they talked directly to microsoft about this but there's nothing official.
- Only the official msn client stopped working, but not due to a server side limitation, and can be patched with tools of suspicious legitness. (note: all closed source windows apps are in the same legitness category)
- Third party clients still work.
- The skype client handles old MSN contacts too - and here's the interesting part: they aren't merged with the skype protocol, but behind the scenes skype creates an XMPP connection to xmpp.messenger.live.com with SSL and using OAuth2 for the login step.
So the connection using the horrible skype protocol only shows the skype contacts, and the connection to the msn XMPP server only shows MSN contacts.
The MSN XMPP server isn't new, it was part of the "messenger developer program", which they claim that will be discontinued after october 2013, but given that they've added an XMPP implementation to the skype client itself, it seems unlikely that this is just part of a transition, but that's just my guess. We don't really know what's going to happen with this.
Anyway here's some official api docs [2], and some extra info [3] (such as the fact that this server doesn't support federation, and that the OAuth2 implementation is extremely similar to facebook's xmpp)
Existing XMPP clients seem to be able to use this new server as long as they handle the OAuth2 step nicely, for example bitlbee seems to support it out of the box[4]. There's an implementation of a pidgin plugin[5] that aims to be a replacement of the old msn prpl but for now only extends the pidgin XMPP auth - the code[6] is approximately 200 lines with a few interesting comments. For example, it seems to mention a JSON REST api that can be used to get profile pictures. I can't help but feel that this is what MSN should have been since the beginning.
Okay that's it. I'm not sure how useful it is to implement only this in emesene right now, as MSNP still works. At least it seems to be the best option for accounts that did the migration to skype, but still want to use third party clients.
Here, have some sweet-ass footnote links:
[1] http://blog.trillian.im/?p=2684
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx
[3] http://blog.process-one.net/details_on_msns_xmpp_server/
[4] http://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoMsnXmpp
[5] http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-msn-xmpp/
[6] http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-msn-xmpp/source/browse/trunk/libmsnxmpp.c
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