No, they are different.
One feels like IM and the other feels like IRC.
Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
31–40 of 295 posts
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#32The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems to be centralize everything . I think it's because centralized systems are easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it? Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that…
Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working well in my desktop client :(
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#33I 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 c…
Because this is how hangouts looks on a 4k monitor: https://imgur.com/lPkNnhR
This is its default size and behavior when in a browser: https://imgur.com/bXL1Ezn
This. Is. Horrible.
I have some very, very unkind words for the person or team or manager who decided to make hangouts show as few lines as possible. It didn't used to be this way.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#34We 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.
When it was coined "Don't Be Evil" was a reference to Microsoft, who at the time was an especially bad actor in the industry, even for them. Dropping support for a protocol is one thing, but actively sabotaging open protocols like MS did is quite another.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#35Gchat was (and is) wonderful -- minimal and elegant. I never understood why Google was so hell bent upon trying to move the users from Gchat to Hangout. They would have enough data to know the number of times users clicked 'no' to moving to the new interface!
Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds like such a loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat.
In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down.
GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp?
Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#37[deleted]
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
Because this is how hangouts looks on a 4k monitor: https://imgur.com/lPkNnhR This is its default size and behavior when in a browser: https://imgur.com/bXL1Ezn This. Is. Horrible. I have some very, very unkind words for the person or team or manager who decided to make hangouts show as few lines as possible. It didn't used to be this way.
You're mixing GChat with Hangout. GChat was(is) minimal and very useful.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#39Right, they couldn't let it be its own thing. It always had to be under the umbrella of some other thing that nobody actually wanted. It's one thing to make something nobody likes, it's quite another to make something very popular and then drown it in social-sauce till its users don't want anything to do with it anymore.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#40We 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…
Right before Slack started getting traction I had though of building a Chrome extension/app on top of Gmail and Gchat that did similar things. Sometimes I still think about it, but I think Slack has started to dominate.