71–80 of 382 posts
WhatsApp, Signal and Viber are the only ones I use and can reach most anyone worldwide.
Google screwed the pooch on their IM strategy long time ago and there's no coming back. Kind of like screwing the Google Pixel 2 by removing the 3.5 mm aux jack.
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.
Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed…
Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features).
I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.
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* this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts
>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…
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.
Yeah, Microsoft has a lot of amazing initiatives to virtualize, emulate, and wrap interfaces around everything in the universe, which is a smart idea long-term, but they never seem to get to the phase of actually optimizing it. Someday, when we convert our entire race into pure energy, we will be able to seamlessly shift between between different levels of indirection in our matrix-like universe, but for now I'm having a lot of trouble just trying to open a single application in the first 4 minutes of booting up a Windows machine. It never used to be so bad, but every year it just keeps getting worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah but I doubt most Windows users use Pidgin. What happened back then ICQ, MSN and AIM dominated at different time and geographically, even though they co-existed since the 90s. Now, not so much.
It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finall…
Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed…
When they started pushing Duo and whatever the other piece of the associated current Google chat/conference... duopoly, is. Supposedly with some move away from and/or deprecation of Hangouts, not to mention the explicit language and dates WRT killing Talk. Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is. I just use non-Google stuff, now, for cha…
Allo is a text chat app with lots of options for stickers and end-to-end encryption disabled by default.
I don't have a strong need for either of these apps.
Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk. Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now st…
A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group thread we have and suggested moving to something "better". The group unanimously shot it down because we don't want to download new apps, create new accounts, then inevitably have to migrate to the brand new flashy service in 3 months.
For context, we're all late 20s/early 30s.
Edit: Actually, I believe SMS is still superior because it works even without a data connection. We spend enough time camping, skiing, attending huge sporting events, etc. any of those other services would be a significant downgrade.
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.
I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
Continuing the train of thought of the comments bemoaning the state of the instant messaging: can anyone recommend a simple instant messaging / voice call combo like the old-timey Skype?