Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, make video calls in HangOuts not suck.
I have yet to find a video call platform that works cross platform as well as Hangouts.
Skype has always been the gold-standard for me. Pretty tough to beat.
Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
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Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest problem of that is that it only works if you can assume everyone in your contact list uses iOS. How do you deal with that problem? (I'm just curious...)
Everyone in my immediate family, as well as my colleagues and my immediate friends have iPhones. Network effects I guess. I only have two or three friends without iPhones. We simply text or call back and forth.
This -- I recently switched to Android thinking "iPhones are luxury phones. Surely a bunch of my friends use Android." Was immediately known as "Green Bubbles" guys for a few weeks by family and friends.
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#13"Users will be able to text friends or a chatbot, which will scour the Web and other sources for information to answer a question"
So instead of typing this in google, you would send a message to a chatbot? I always found chat bots gimmicky, just like Siri. It's great as a novelty, nothing else..
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#14"WeChat, for instance, lets users shop, pay bills and book appointments." Does anyone have experience with it? Is it actually useful, or just a gimmick? And I have to point out that there is a protocol which is open, supports both users and services with registration, supports federation, and supports arbitrary payloads, making it a great solution for a chat bot platform... But of course everyone dropped xmpp and now…
An excellent read about WeChat from a16z: http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone in my immediate family, as well as my colleagues and my immediate friends have iPhones. Network effects I guess. I only have two or three friends without iPhones. We simply text or call back and forth.
This -- I recently switched to Android thinking "iPhones are luxury phones. Surely a bunch of my friends use Android." Was immediately known as "Green Bubbles" guys for a few weeks by family and friends.
But even the green bubble solution is "perfect". One app. One experience. I want to message this person, through the internet for free if possible and if not - just send it as a text. I don't want 4 apps on my phone to do the same thing, and that's why I don't see the point in being an also-ran
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#16I remember when Google Talk was a thing and actually worked well.
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
This -- I recently switched to Android thinking "iPhones are luxury phones. Surely a bunch of my friends use Android." Was immediately known as "Green Bubbles" guys for a few weeks by family and friends.
But even the green bubble solution is "perfect". One app. One experience. I want to message this person, through the internet for free if possible and if not - just send it as a text. I don't want 4 apps on my phone to do the same thing, and that's why I don't see the point in being an also-ran
Hah, I didn't even get "green bubbles" reference until I came back here just now :-) (I'm not an iOS user.)
Some of the downside about text is that it often shows unpredictable behavior, especially when it involves going over carrier's gateway to other networks, or involving some non-ordinary systems like Google Voice. Though, it seems to be improving now, but I used to see anything from garbled messages to complete silence, and it often exhibited different behavior between combinations of different sender and receiver. (For instance A, and B in same network might have worked OK, but A to some user in another network being able to receive, or sometimes being able to receive one way, but corrupts for the other way around, etc.)
Google Voice until recently (maybe a year ago?) or so, couldn't do any group MMS at all, and would simply get ignored. One blamed would be one who deviates from standards, but my most pet peeve of SMS/MMS is that it offers very little to no error indications when something goes wrong.
I actually manage a volunteer team of 30 or so with varying types of devices, where one to many communication is highly needed, and I find messaging solution very complicated problem to solve. (And yes, I'm likely resort to having like 2 to 3 apps to get it done...)
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#18Who'd use it? They'll just kill it off in 2 years anyway.
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#19I was surprised to read that "Google has struggled to create such network effects with both Hangouts and Messenger." At my university, all the student groups that I have worked on use Google docs, Messenger, and Hangouts to coordinate. We don't use Messenger a lot, only when we are online working on a document together, but we do use Hangouts weekly. For us, Google is for group productivity (sort of like Slack), but I couldn't see using Google Messenger for communicating with friends or asking questions to a chat bot. I wonder who their target audience is for this new product. Any ideas?
Re: Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
#20"WeChat, for instance, lets users shop, pay bills and book appointments." Does anyone have experience with it? Is it actually useful, or just a gimmick? And I have to point out that there is a protocol which is open, supports both users and services with registration, supports federation, and supports arbitrary payloads, making it a great solution for a chat bot platform... But of course everyone dropped xmpp and now…
Living in China and living the wechat platform. I pay my groceries by presenting a QR code, pay my taxi by scanning the driver's QR code, pay my utilities and to up my mobile. Really handy!