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Google Allo – First Impression

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Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#81

Post by soylentcola »

yoz-y wrote: post #75
JshWright wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Group conversation starts to suck when you have to fall back to SMS. Just from personal use, IM-type services handle it fine but they're not always cross platform.

Friends on iPhones use the iOS IM app but when they add someone to a group chat who isn't on iOS, they get the messages as attachments to MMS. Android's Messenger app handles this OK at the moment but it didn't always. And when SMS/MMS was integrated into Hangouts, it never handled it well.

Hangouts works fine for groups messages and at least you can install that on iOS but not everyone will want to use something else when they already use iMessage. Allo works but unless you use Allo, you get SMS/MMS from some random new number.

Basically, from what I gather, good group conversation support is a function of IP-based IM services and SMS/MMS was never really meant to handle that without workarounds and hacks. But SMS/MMS are a standard that any mobile device can handle whereas all the third party services and apps require either a particular OS or at least another messaging app to be installed.

Really would've loved to see a standard protocol with proper encryption and adoption by all major platforms but that doesn't seem to work for the Apples/Googles/Facebooks/etc of the world who would rather use Messaging as a way to keep you on their platform. Why would you leave when it would mean you can't keep those group chats you have with friends, family, and coworkers you've been having for all this time?

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#82

Post by Arathorn »

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.

Actually, E2E does end up being really important in Matrix because room history gets synchronised across all the participating users in a room. So assuming you have /any/ non-local users in the room, they'll end up storing a copy of the conversation in plaintext-equivalent on their servers unless you have E2E, which rapidly becomes non-desirable for any private rooms given you don't want to have to trust everyone's sysadmins. And given 'run your own server' is half the joy of Matrix, we don't want to tell people to turn off federation if they want security!

This is why we've made a real effort with Olm & Megolm (http://matrix.org/git/olm/about/) in Matrix to ensure that E2E is there in the baseline, and will be turned on by default for all private rooms. (disclaimer: I work on Matrix)

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#83

Post by qznc »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #37
amelius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

> a tiny number of email providers

The number is not tiny if you include work email addresses: @apple.com, @ibm.com, @whitehouse.gov, @mit.edu, @bmw.com, ...

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#84

Post by soylentcola »

stevewillows wrote: post #78

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 t…

For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising.

And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#85

Post by touristtam »

hackaflocka wrote: post #4

If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change p…

> Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

Funny, cause Xiaomi has this working fine. I've changed device not long ago and it freaked me out a little.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#86

Post by tsunamifury »

billyjobob wrote: post #56

I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.

You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time, this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#87

Post by guruparan18 »

corndoge wrote: post #23
guruparan18 wrote: post #20

You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon @Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.

You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.

Agreed. But I prefer text interface over voice. Having @Google assistant in group chat is kind of creepy but still interesting. It can share my location to the group, show weather and other search results. I wish Google assistant can setup group reminders(now it does not). It is certainly already replaced my Google search.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#88

Post by amyjess »

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.

> What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.

Email is old enough to be grandfathered in. SMTP dates back to 1982, long before the commercialization of the Internet.

Chat doesn't have that history. It was first popularized by proprietary apps like AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, and MSN. When Jabber/XMPP came along and created an open standard, it was a reaction to the proprietary apps, which all had significant mindshare. Facebook and Google were the only major players to adopt XMPP, and that was just temporary until they managed to get their proprietary solutions off the ground.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#89

Post by gkya »

qznc wrote: post #83
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.

> a tiny number of email providers The number is not tiny if you include work email addresses: @apple.com, @ibm.com, @whitehouse.gov, @mit.edu, @bmw.com, ...

Most often a Google Apps email address.

Re: Google Allo – First Impression

#90

Post by wldcordeiro »

soylentcola wrote: post #84
stevewillows wrote: post #78

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 t…

For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising. And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video call…

The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.
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