What a sad day.<p>A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard.  Users don&#x27;t benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps.<p>(Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment.  There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat&#x27;s been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)