> VOIP had a chance to become as ubiquitous and convenient
> as email, but the drop of xmpp fot voice and video took
> us back 10 years.
XMPP had its chance, and failed to deliver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC is the modern standard-to-be for VOIP, and the original implementation was created by Google.
- unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web.
- there is no way to federate with google hangout or other WebRTC services, is there? This is the issue. hHangout is an amazing piece of software, but they give it to us for free to force us to register and use google accounts.
btw, I don't think xmpp failed, what failed is to settle on good standards for voice and video (every time a standard emerged, somebody came up with a better one that was closed source which broke inter-compatibility) and really good clients (only skype and google voice could echo cancellation properly). xmpp, and SIP for that matter, are really about establishing the connection, they don't really care how the rest of the communication is done. What you are saying is like saying email failed because different people interpret html slightly differently.
> unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not
> describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the
> video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web.
Correct. The underlying application is responsible for initiating calls, using a protocol such as SIP.
> there is no way to federate with google hangout or
> other WebRTC services, is there?
That's up to the service. Hangouts doesn't permit federation, but there should be no technical barriers to launching a federated video-chat service.
