Jabber: get full history from Hangouts

[calabar]

In the past I used Jabber to communicate with GTalk contacts.
When Google moved to Hangouts, I continued to use Jabber but I lost offline messages.
So my Histories are full of "holes" and often not understandable.

The question is: is it possible to periodically import or synchronize my Miranda history database with hangouts one, so I can store complete and intelligible conversations?


PS: is Jabber the right plugin to communicate with Hangouts contacts, ot maybe I should switch to something other?

[calabar]

No one has any idea?

What do you use to communicate with Hangouts contacts?

[watcher]

What do you use to communicate with Hangouts contacts?

Gtalk

The question is: is it possible to periodically import or synchronize my Miranda history database with hangouts one, so I can store complete and intelligible conversations?
 

There is no way yet to do that.

PS: is Jabber the right plugin to communicate with Hangouts contacts, ot maybe I should switch to something other?

Jabber plugin is the only way for now.

[calabar]

Thanks for the answer.
Is there a light for the future? Maybe another protocol to replace Jabber or some way provided by google to connect to their history database?

[watcher]

Is there a light for the future? Maybe another protocol to replace Jabber or some way provided by google to connect to their history database?

I think Google will eventually  close Gtalk an we will have to create Hangouts plugin (hope it would be possible).

[White-Tiger]

Hope Google changes his mind and starts to support XMPP once again^^
Sure XMPP might not be the protocol it should've been... but to let it down isn't good either.. not if you're not providing a better alternative.. (and IIRC, Google tried to build VoIP into XMPP... but with no real success.)

I mean.. XMPP had transports, so a new protocol could easily offer their own transport for XMPP and be compatible with it.. yet still make things better.. I wish Google had chosen this way.. It likely would have in its earlier days.. but it doesn't seem to follow his own credo much these days. There might be a "good" reason why they don't want to support it anymore.. such as that no IM implemented VoIP and this prevented GTalk users from using it with people who didn't use it... thus GTalk maybe got flawed by ignorant beings and died eventually because of that...

[calabar]

Understood.
Google is to "blame" because they choose a proprietary approach instead then an open one.
I can undestand that XMPP was not adequate for their aims (but support offline messages or provide a fast way to syncronize history would be not so difficult... clearly they want people leave XMPP so they can dismiss the support without too noise), but why they decided to maintain the protocol closed?

[AnrDaemon]

It is not enough to implement something. You should make the implementation accessible and transparent for it to reach wider audience.
But it requires effort or time.
HTML/HTTP was developed many years ago and it only survived because it was transparent, accessible and eventually it just outlived its concurents.
XMPP isn't as old and honestly it lacking community support. In both standardisation and implementation.
The most common argument against it is that "it doesn't support feature X". And to the "then make an extension proposal and reference implementation", they say "too much effort, I could just make my own messenger in less than half the time."

[White-Tiger]

Sorry.. have to correct my previous post... some IM's implemented Google's VoIP after some time..
Google released it as libjingle shortly after launch near end of 2005, yet XMPP only accepted it as a "draft" near end of 2009. That is 4 years later... and now almost 5 years later doesn't seem to be much further...

Miranda IM had experimental support for it with JGTalk: http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?13768-Jingle-Jabber-plugin-%28JGTalk-Protocol-JGmail-libjingle-mod%29

[AnrDaemon]

If you read the history of the article between the lines, you would notice the amount of work been done to bring it to the current state.
If my fingers tell me right, the final specification is split between 2 or 3 separate drafts.

[aekotra]

It's  quite a bad situation that offline messages in Hangouts is not supported.  If you use Miranda as your only Hangouts client (as I do), a contact can send you message while you're offline and you will never know anything about it.  Perhaps the GTalkExt developers can remedy this?

[calabar]

I resume this quite old topic because, in the meantime, I came across the Google Takeout service, that allows to download hangouts histories.
The download is a zip archive containing an html and a json files. The json is very verbose, but I think that it would be easy for developers to create a parser that allows to import the histories into Miranda database. Is there any chance for that?

There is even an online php parser (code is available here) that allows to read and download the histories in various formats.

An "hangouts import" plugin, that allows to import the histories retrieved from Google Takeout will solve my problem to have almost unreadable histories for my hangouts conversations.

[Robyer]

Maybe you could write own rules for ImportTXT plugin? (Just an idea)

[Vulpix]

Maybe you could write own rules for ImportTXT plugin? (Just an idea)

If you get some kind of text-based output, I guarantee importTXT can be used for what you need. I used it to great success with skype history export from old skype (v4 / v5) to import huge histories (~400k messages) without issues. Making your own rules should be simple too, just look at some of the existing presets and "hack" it :p

[Robyer]

Vulpix, btw if you have some definitions that aren't in ImportTXT's repository, can you share it with us?