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Google Allo – First Impression

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Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#71

Post by pjc50 »

amelius wrote: post #69
pjc50 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email allows just enough delay for antispam to do its work in, plus a whole range of antispam solutions involving backoff. Chat requires much lower latency. Any federated/distributed chat system would have to deal with spam and abuse upfront in its design, or people would just migrate back towards controlled systems without those problems. There's a second issue of where the chat continuity should be kept across devi…

> Email allows just enough delay for antispam to do its work in One solution is to only check for spam if the sender is not in your address book. And with chat, you usually have to allow somebody in your address book.

In email, senders can be trivially forged.

In a modern system, you'd probably want encryption and authentication of who you're talking to. Which is great except now you have to do key management, god help you.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#72

Post by pmontra »

amelius wrote: post #35
beefsack wrote: post #18

The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html

I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet. What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.

By historical reasons we assumed that email must be interoperable so you can send email from gmail to yahoo or any other corporate controlled silo. We gave up that requirements with chats because there were very little expectations of interoperability despite XMPP.

Email is going to be interoperable forever, chats will become a 90-10 business like search. The only difference is that there will be different vertical chats monopolists for different markets (personal, business, developers, etc)

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#73

Post by JustSomeNobody »

beefsack wrote: post #18

The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html

I definitely want an open service to succeed. I think one big problem is with the major players, non-techies know they just work (more or less) and people will use them so there's not much hassle. Even among techies, there's chat fatigue now.

That being said, I have this nagging idea in my head that the more chat apps that get thrown at people, the easier it may be for an open service to prevail.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#74

Post by ForHackernews »

kowdermeister wrote: post #51
rmc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.

Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?

You can run http://www.iredmail.org/ which is an integrated toolkit of open source tools to make a mail server.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#75

Post by yoz-y »

JshWright wrote: post #38
LeoPanthera wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet. With the vast majority of email users using a tiny number of email providers, it effectively is. If Gmail decides that your personal mail server is sending spam, it becomes effectively useless.

Yeah, but there is no denying that email "federation" works very well (which makes sense, and it was pretty much the only major design goal). The lack of easy federation is why there are millions of chat 'bubbles' out there.

Also, chat ecosystems are somewhat federated on your device. Notifications and grouping (on iOS) and contacts integration (on Android and Windows) make it quite easy to run multiple chat clients at the same time so people do not bother.

The one big problem is group conversations, however.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#76

Post by joncrocks »

pritambarhate wrote: post #68
hbosch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0]. It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS,…

I just tried it out. Despite of using GMail for years, I didn't know Google had created hangouts.google.com. :-) Just tried it out and to my disappointment, it doesn't allow me to send a file other than images to other users. Google engineers if you are listening please add the ability to send docs and files to other users!

Presumably this is because they don't want hangouts to become a de facto file sharing service, by the fact that the person you're messaging could be offline and you might expect the content to be archived/re-downloadable. The fact that pictures are shareable is (I think) because they do/can put the pictures into a google photos gallery.

What you probably want to do is put it in google drive and then share a link in hangouts.

(Not a googler)

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#77

Post by spacehunt »

jclos wrote: post #59
bvm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything other than Google "Read my unread emails".

That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant, even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment that's on my calendar? Or my last a…

"Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt" both are working for me.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#78

Post by stevewillows »

It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS.

With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days.

I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications.

It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#79

Post by brightball »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #73
beefsack wrote: post #18

The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html

I definitely want an open service to succeed. I think one big problem is with the major players, non-techies know they just work (more or less) and people will use them so there's not much hassle. Even among techies, there's chat fatigue now. That being said, I have this nagging idea in my head that the more chat apps that get thrown at people, the easier it may be for an open service to prevail.

I'd tend to agree with you. With a diffusion of options you're essentially going to see the natural rise of 2 corporate competitors and 1 alternative option that many people support out of principle. It's a mind share pattern that seems to exist in many places:

Hipchat, Slack, Matrix

Windows, OSX, Ubuntu Linux

Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians

.NET, Java, Open Source Dynamic options -> Ruby/Python/Javascript/PHP/Elixir/Perl

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#80

Post by dublinben »

corney91 wrote: post #64
Veratyr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.

To be honest, I don't even think E2E is as important in a distributed system. If you're worried about who can see your messages, you can just set up your own server and force server-to-server and client-to-server encryption.

You shouldn't have to set up your own server to have secure communication. It should be the default for all users.
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