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Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#21

Post by Yhippa »

chickenbane wrote: post #4

I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo. I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like a…

> I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.

I've started using the Skype Summarize bot in the Outlook website and it's pretty cool. Rather than going to a separate site and deal with subpar UI/UX you just paste the article URL in and you get your summary via the chat window. I was skeptical of all of Google's messaging platforms but if they can come close to providing me this functionality I'm on board. Getting things done via bots vs going to a website IMO is the future.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#22

Post by csydas »

bluejekyll wrote: post #2

I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.

What do you think made it horrible?

I think it had a simple UI, which for many things worked very well. When I managed the Technical Support for a university using Google Apps for Education, gchat's simple interface was kind of a blessing in that everyone on the campus had it, it was unobtrusive, automatically saved and searchable (though the search could have used some improvements), and you could make calls/video calls without leaving your email.

When it switched to hangouts, a lot of the simplicity left with it in favor of a more social experience; large user-pics on by default (at the beginning I don't think you could customize this either), the windows were significantly bigger, and the text box lost space to the emoji/add picture buttons.

It was a pretty simple, out of the way, and concise chat option with, as far as I could tell, nothing really hidden. What you saw is what you got.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#23

Post by rib3ye »

Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#24

Post by jasonkostempski »

foobarbecue wrote: post #14
CJKinni wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.

But you can abstract that stuff in the client with a few lines of code and the user never needs to know! All the IRC web clients do it. mibbit used to be great, and then they mysteriously disappeared...

Mysteriously disappeared? I don't know anything about it's history but I happen to use something that, at least, goes by that name [1].

[1] https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&serv...

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#26

Post by Frompo »

CJKinni wrote: post #9
wtbob wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing .

> The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.

What? For irc you can connect without an account, how is that harder than forcing people to register on github first?

Oh, you mean its easier for people who already have github account? Who are these people that create accounts on a hosting service for one of the more complicated version control systems but find connecting to ftp servers and entering cli commands too daunting?

If you want to talk about confusing, in gitter I can navigate to a room and see what happens in it but I need to press an extra button to actually be able to talk in it? What? Rooms, private chats and /me? Many parts of gitter doesn't make sense if you don't know the whole chat paradigm that irc created.

Gitter derives it utility purely in the better web client and its custom built integration with github.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#27

Post by secabeen »

wtbob wrote: post #5
bluejekyll wrote: post #2

I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.

The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing .

Slack makes mobile work in a way that IRC didn't. IRC axiomatically assumes you're on a stable connection. There weren't any widely deployed solutions that allowed you to intermittently connect and see the conversation that passed while you were gone inline.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#28

Post by aerovistae »

rib3ye wrote: post #23

Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.

Did you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs?

The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays), and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded all of them by many years.

I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the article. I can still dream.

It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was 2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly impressive failure.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#29

Post by cromwellian »

inopinatus wrote: post #11
mmastrac wrote: post #6

We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to t…

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives.

I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural Dna that "open always wins" pretty much leads to losing and having to play catch up.

I think at this point the biggest hope is that something like telegram can become the defacto new xmpp.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#30

Post by bazqux2 »

zatkin wrote: post #10
mmastrac wrote: post #6

We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to t…

My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.

XMPP is a poor protocol. I can completely understand why they would want to break compatibility.
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