Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app

They did support client-server federation, but not server-server federation.

Well, real live conversations differ from digital ones. Granted that now we can talk about that topic without being in the same room, but depending the topic you won't word your opinion in certain channels, you self censored yourself depending where you are, that's why more than privacy or security what is needed is knowledge about the channel.

I might got wrong the reasons why Google is secure, but I found it convincing

> They would not do this without a strategic thought

But, as the saying goes, "the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry".

Google really does have a really skittish habit of acquisitions, creations, and closures. Remember 'buzzing' with your email? Remember Wave, the product that not even Google knew what to do with? Having a large assortment of applications in your portfolio isn't what is being criticized when calling Google a "clusterfuck", it's the strangeness by which this portfolio is managed. Products rise and fall seemingly without a lot of warning. Some are integrated into others, others are heavily promoted while others are left to fester. With Facebook's acquisitions, they mostly are left to run on their own, just under Facebook control with Facebook slowly sliding their tendrils into each app. (We see this with Whatsapp, Instagram is overrun with ads), but the products themselves aren't integrated or changed dramatically for the end user.

With Google, it's really difficult to get excited or really heavily invested in products that aren't called Gmail because it's just really hard to tell what the product is going to be doing even half a year down the line, or if it will even exist. This isn't "like all other products", this is a statement based off of how Google historically has operated.

It's great that Google is willing to take risks, but they keep pushing these new ventures as having re-invented the wheel and all of the ventures require quite a bit of buy-in from the end-users; if it fails for Google, they write it off since they can. End users are left with a obsolete product they likely intended to use for a heck of a lot longer.

So yeah, when you have Google releasing new apps that compete with already existing Google Apps (as well as a multitude of other similar apps from other companies), I think it's fair to wonder what is going on. Even if there is a strategy, I'm not convinced that it's much more than "let's see if people like this better than ____", which isn't exactly a winning strategy in my book.

Allo/Duo just don't really seem to offer much that doesn't already exist, and their release makes me suspicious about whether or not their current message/video/voice service, Hangouts, is about to get axed or left in the dust or what.

Whats "client-server" federation? Only the fact that you are able to connect via an openly specified protocol or is there more to it?

As much as people like a good conspiracy, that would be a pretty pointless one. There are tens of thousands people at google who could look at the source code, many of them with a left-wing/civil liberties attitude.

To get all of them to stay silent, and to evade analysis of the binary is, if not impossible, simply not worth whatever they could get out of reading my messages (esp. considering their uninterrupted stream of emails to read).

It's also why the concept of "brands" makes more sense than may are willing to admit: a blatant lie such as this would probably be worse for google than VWs little problem. Reading someone's private stuff is just bound to rouse more emotions than whatever comes out of the back of your car.