How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#31

Post by ndespres » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #20

trothamel wrote: post #13

Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond. And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence…

Did presence ever really work though? I’ve been online since the late 90s and I don’t remember ever considering it reliable except perhaps for people on IRC who I knew had a transient internet connection (namely dialup). I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar). It’s kind of funny, considering t…

AIM handled presence quite well- custom "away" messages, easily editable "profiles" which were like a .plan file to include a note about where you were logged in, idle timers, icon to tell if an IM was forwarded to a cell phone. Finally while it lacked anything like Slack has to store your messages centrally and persistently, AIM would notify a user when you logged on to more than one location and allow remote logoff of your other sessions to ensure subsequent messages only went to your current session.

I'm glad you've been blessed with whatever Apple Magic lets iMessage work across devices for you but between my iPad iPhone and MacBook all I can say is I follow up important messages with a phone call because it's one of the more unreliable and indecipherable systems I've never been able to figure out.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#32

Post by bronson » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#33

Post by brohoolio » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

I have a folder on my iPhone for all the various google chat apps, allo, duo, hangouts, meet and the list goes on and on.

Not an application, but a whole folder filled with chat applications!

All my friend have moved onto slack.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#34

Post by rch » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:50 AM UTC

pilom wrote: post #28

One of the things I love about Google Fi is that I'm still allowed to effectively use Google Talk and SMS still works in Hangouts on my phone. I can do all messaging from the hangouts app with people over SMS or if they use hangouts, the message can go over that. I can text and call with my real phone number through the Gmail interface. Unfortunately, those with Google Fi are the only ones still allowed to use it tha…

Sure but the web interface for hangouts ruins the whole experience. How search functionality can be ignored in a Google product is beyond me.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#35

Post by inferiorhuman » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:52 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #18

djsumdog wrote: post #10

I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade. Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction. I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having…

Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.

> Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made.

That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#36

Post by superasn » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:53 AM UTC

bronson wrote: post #32

andrepd wrote: post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??

I just realized that Google+ isn't dead yet. Guess someone at Google is still hopeful about its future?

P.S. Also the amount of shit Google+ has fucked wrt to Google services in amazing. It also killed the "+" sign in Google's search results too.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#37

Post by slacka » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #27

lobster_johnson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.

The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.

Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good.

The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#38

Post by yeukhon » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:57 AM UTC

Google Talk was like the “cool” version of AIM to me when I was using it between 2010 and 2013. I could access Talk from my browser or from a desktop client (Pidgin, and I believe there used to be an official Talk desktop client).

For some like me, I didn’t mind to have my messages/conversations stored like an email (I am aware of some people’s privacy cocnerns). Even today I can go back to my Gmail and look up my conversations with friends and family. I own the conversation history, and I can export them at any given time! I can search them and sort them directly in Gmail.

Now I use WhatsApp, Messenger, text messeage, and Wechat (for different groups of people), I don’t know any mechanism to export my conversations. For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is supported and is on per contact basis. No global search...

Communication used to be, hmm, simple communication: no snap, no video, no crazy emojis and stickers :)

Google, what happened? :Orz

Edit: The only thing still usable is the free phone call from and to U.S. I use it all the time since carrier signal is so unreliable and uneven (and subject to surrounding environment) so I just hop on Wifi to make calls, esp at work. PLEASE DON’T KILL IT .

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#39

Post by eridius » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 3:59 AM UTC

rident wrote: post #26

aianus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).

Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473

Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#40

Post by jayd16 » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the longest and they get the most flack for it.