Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
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
#52Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
Well it would need a good design too. Let's not say that just piling on features would lead to success. Too many open source projects have already had that perspective... It needs to be fun to use with no learning curve and continue to be fun months down the road.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#53Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix (https://matrix.org), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it enter people's consciousness as one of the most serious contenders for messaging systems.
Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client (https://vector.im/). You can connect to the public server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec and the system are more promising than anything else out there today.
If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my project, Ruma (https://www.ruma.io/), which is a Rust implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#54Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…
> a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company
Half of the people reading tune out very quickly around this point.
Most people want something that solves 80% of their problems with 20% reduction in headaches.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#55Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…
This is cool. But IMHO the point of the article is about Google losing its first-mover advantage in chat apps due to wrong branding and prediction for GChat, not interoperability.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#56We 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.
"was the real moment Google gave up on team communications"
I believe so too and Wave might have failed because Google said "this is instead of email". Had they markeded Wave as a "team communications suite" like Microsoft is doing today with their team communication tools, and all the aother players too (we're getting used to hearing about communications suites especially at work, right?). But the world was probably not ready to hear about communication suites until maybe 2010, så Wave was also too early. And it definetly wasn't a email replacement.
Maybe this high-lights the drawbacks of being too focused on your core business, so focused that you cut of an arm (gchat) because it wasn't in line with your philosophy of having a totally open, standardized protocol that you (Google) hoped everyone eventually would be using. The players of today do not care about these things, they care about getting traction and a massive user-base and about encryption and privacy and claim their place in the spot-light because users love them.
Google knew we loved gchat. They must have know why. Google Drive + gmail + gchat, tailored towards businesses: good bye Office 356, see you never. Microsoft would be limping without Office... how could Google fail to make this happen?
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#57Gchat 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…
I thought Google Wave had huge potential but the rollout was so poorly handled. It was a group app that only called people in by invitation, so I couldn't add my team members without them having to go through a signup and wait for approval process, killing all momentum.
Yeah, Wave created quite a buzz, at least within developers/early-adopters. It was complicated and heavy though. I didn't get fond of its features, for the few weeks that it existed.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#58Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…
> a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company Half of the people reading tune out very quickly around this point. Most people want something that solves 80% of their problems with 20% reduction in headaches.
The only major problem I still have with Vector is that despite Matrix the protocol specifying ways to register and authenticate accounts using various web apis like oauth[1] Vector is always pushed as the premium Matrix webclient but it doesn't support anything but username / password.
You would be amazed how many people simply refuse to create new username / password pairs in 2016. And its a good thing. We should be past username / password. Support oauth2, openid connect, and for the privacy minded... keep complaining to Mozilla that they shutdown Persona.
http://matrix.org/docs/spec/r0.0.1/client_server.html#oauth2...
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#59gchat was great. I really wish Google build on Hangouts to integrate SMS like iMessage. Having a proper desktop SMS client is the only reason I ended up going back to IOS a few months ago.
I can understand why they dropped XMPP. I'm not sure if they really violated their 'don't be evil' motto as much as they recognized that other services were improving on their dime.
I like Slack for corporate environments, but IRC is still top dog when it comes to interest-based real-time communities.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#60Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
There's a community forked version with more active developers, features, etc here: https://github.com/thelounge/lounge. Plugin support is still sparse, but there is a packages[0] POC branch, along with a wiki page detailing the ideal plugin/extension/package system[1]
[0] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/tree/packages [1] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/wiki/Package-system-desi...