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?

#61

Post by StudentStuff » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

eridius wrote: post #52

Larrikin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was first to go. I'm sure they were ecstatic to have an excuse to end support when Firefox changed how their add-ons work.

Didn't they change it so it's much more similar to how Chrome extensions work? Shouldn't it in fact be easier now to have an extension work in both Chrome and Firefox? The Mozilla wiki page on WebExtensions even says "Much of the specifics of the new API are similar to the Blink extension API."

The Chrome extension used should work just fine with Firefox, but Google would rather try and force vendor lock-in. At this point I just use Jitsi, it works every time without any browser extensions to do a quick video conference or screen share.

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

#62

Post by _asummers » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

rch wrote: post #34

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.

You can search for label:chats in Gmail (extremely poor workaround) but this doesn't work in Inbox, forcing you to navigate back to Gmail to search chat history.

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

#63

Post by fencepost » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #11

That's alright, the competitors are even worse. I used to use Skype on Linux. They stopped development on the Linux client a decade ago, but it kept working just fine. And then they released a new client and forced everyone to upgrade. The new client is so bad in terms of sound quality that I've been forced to switch to Hangouts.

You might be able to use Slack or Discord, though I don't believe either offer video options and the only real mention of voice that I saw for Slack was for calls.

Still, Discord might actually be worth looking at - it's targeted at gamers, but it does at least small-group voice chat reasonably well in my experience.

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

#64

Post by m3kw9 » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

I thought talk and hangouts do the same things, google needs to do a better job in marketing

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

#65

Post by MikusR » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

superasn wrote: post #36

bronson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have to keep Linus happy.

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

#66

Post by craftyguy » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:47 AM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #16

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…

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.

I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.

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

#67

Post by niftich » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:48 AM UTC

There are several contributing factors to Google's disastrous history with messaging services, but a significant cause is Google being spooked by Facebook.

In an earlier post of mine [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch on 2008-07-11 -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06.

Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email.

To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Unfortunately a few months later on 2010-05-20, Android finally got push notifications, which enabled third-party messaging apps to be viable on Android. This led to the rise of cross-platform messaging network apps like WhatsApp, whose success came back to hurt Google later.

Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and on 2011-08-09 they introduced a standalone app for just Facebook Chat, called 'Messenger'.

On 2011-10-12, Apple released iOS 5, which came with iMessages. This significantly improved the iOS platform's story on messaging, putting further pressure on Google. Having put many of its eggs into the Google Plus basket, it needed a win, which it didn't get.

On 2013-05-15, Google liberated Hangouts from Google Plus so that it could address messaging and social networking separately. Hangouts was being repositioned as the Android-default messaging app. This helped onboard new users, but on 2014-02-19 Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp. At this point Google lost, and it began to flail about, sometimes reviving long-forgotten apps like Google Voice, sometimes deprecating integrations it had encouraged previously, and then making two more messaging apps.

Sources (in detail at):

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

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

#68

Post by mrastro » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:49 AM UTC

jimjimjim wrote: post #51

cbhl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will interface with the underlying protocol.

Yep, web apps are just plan bad, but i can understand why a startup might go that way to shorten time to market, but replacing a native app with a web app should be a shootable offense

This is a good rule of thumb, but web apps have the serious advantage of being (nearly, excluding differences between browsers) platform-agnostic. This saves development time as you pointed out but also allows easier cross-platform support. For example, Skype which wasn't officially supported on Linux (it was left frozen at some ancient version) until it was ported to a web app. After this change, Linux gets the same latest version as all other operating systems.

I don't know about you, but I'd trade any reasonable performance degradation for broader support of a product I use.

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

#69

Post by ocdtrekkie » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:51 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.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there.

...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

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

#70

Post by iamgopal » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:52 AM UTC

Google needs to streamline their communication product in to one that works across all platforms. And also need better product manager that understands that choices are bad. And not working choice doubly so.