What really disappoints me about the current crop of VC funded messaging apps is that none of them care very strongly about user privacy. Even apps that claim to keep your messages "encrypted" are closed source and don't include details about their encryption techniques.

There are open source encrypted messaging apps like ChatSecure [1][2], and TextSecure [3] but they lack some of the modern vanity features that users expect and they can seem difficult to setup for an average user.

1. https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS

2. https://github.com/guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid

3. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/

A pretty relevant article about what myself and temas are working on now: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-...

IMO, interop/federation is going to be a tremendous long-term effort and include many standards, but is definitely feasible, inevitable even. There's a lot of innovation happening in messaging again thanks to mobile, we just need to start taking the best of what we've all learned already and work together to improve everyone's stack collectively.

Everythign old is new again. Remember the days of MSN vs ICQ vs AIM etc etc etc?

All of these apps are essentially doing the same things - sending text, pictures, and status notifications. It's a hard sell, but we really need a standard like email or xmpp to allow interoperability.

For a while I was heavily using Adium, with many extensions, theme packs, and Whatsapp. I'm now just using Messages on mac/iphone and much prefer it. Bells and whistles are only interesting for so long. Text and emails, on computer and phone beats any long feature list.

Same for music, I had customised Winamp and another one I can't remember the name of, but now I'm back to iTunes. I do need a new podcast client now that iTunes makes it difficult to know which episodes are downloaded. Any suggestions?

Oh where or where is the IETF. This is the kind of thing that needs a standard for the message content in a way that is extensible. Maybe plain HTML/CSS is sufficient for most stuff. Does anything from the Jabber world work for this?

I hate the million inboxes I have. It would be nice if you could at least use one application to manage all the inboxes of all the devices.

Seems like Google Wave was a good first attempt at an open-source standard that could have worked here.

Google is making a play too, with Hangouts now handling SMS. Although the people I've talked to who try that hate it, because it often sends a chat message when they wanted to text the person. Texts are just seen as much more personal and immediate where are chat texts aren't much different from email.

It's sad none of them offers anything interesting. Snapchat was novel for 5 seconds, and now it's just old and stupid...