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

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

#111

Post by dnsva »

The following are postulations that I have not managed to refute since 2013.

Google clearly knows what they have made. The theory that nobody cares to fix this is false. They have good engineers.

Google was always tracking our location and scanning our emails. Few things happened simultaneously in 2014. Google tried to replace the messaging app with hangouts, blatantly stepping on privacy. Inadvertent signing ups for Google+ could occur. I switched to Cyanogenmod.

Navigating new privacy settings would took so long. Then Google maps started suggesting where I intend to go.

Not very creepy. It seems to me that Google intend to do the right thing, which is to declare publicly that our privacy is compromised, (e.g. Snowden) when we use Online centralized products. That is a good thing. I stopped trusting my ill-founded sense of privacy.

I lived in Canada, perhaps the timing was different in the states.

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

#112

Post by pjmlp »

mrastro wrote: post #68
jimjimjim wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that it is exponential, to the point of having a couple of applications running at the same time, requires a CRAY class computer.

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

#114

Post by ajmurmann »

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.

It also had a tiny footprint.

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

#115

Post by csydas »

Spooky23 wrote: post #41
b1daly wrote: post #22

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…

It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.

Teams is an afterthought from Microsoft in its continuing lineage of Collaboration Applications.

We recently switched to it for a world wide support team and it's a step down.

- No direct quoting, only threaded replies in group chats.

- No linking to Threads, even though you can personally bookmark it

- No message indications except in 1 on 1 chats ad hoc chats, so if you're in a large group thread, you have no idea if someone is paying attention or not

- Poor UI decisions (the menu which appears over messages for "options/bookmark/like" will obscure messages if the same user sent two messages in a row; because it appears over the right-most part and the second of two messages from the same user doesn't include the user info, the menu will hide whatever's at the end of the message).

- Scrolling back in a message thread (group or personal) is pointless, as messages take so long to load, and it seems to load sequentially. (i.e., you can't just scroll to approximately where you think the message is; if you scroll for 10 minutes, it will still just load the most recent messages before continuing)

- Search has no proper way of search only one conversation, it's all or nothing.

- The mobile app is incredibly slow to sync regardless of whether it's on data or wireless.

I could go on for awhile on this. I honestly wonder if anyone at Microsoft even tried to use Teams before they released it, since everything about it feels like it was just tossed in there and the devs weren't allowed to look at what other collaborative chat apps did to make them good. Even their "me too" implementation of things like giphy integration or inserting photos in to the chat is very poor (dragging a photo from desktop will insert it into the thread, but dragging it from the web will upload it to sharepoint, though both take very long to upload). Accessing Sharepoint content takes a long time because Microsoft's login to the Office 365 space takes a long time. All text is actually rich text, but for some reason they included a pseudo markdown syntax which just toggles the rich text functions (bold, italics, etc) whether you mean to or not. You can't just escape these characters either since it's not that well thought out of a function.

When we briefly had Skype For Business, I thought that Microsoft couldn't do any worse, but they really did their homework for Teams and made a real horrible product that works for basically no one.

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

#116

Post by jrockway »

signal11 wrote: post #73
rident wrote: post #9

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…

Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. 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,…

> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.

That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation.

As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine.

My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No.

For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app".

I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord:

https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW

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

#117

Post by Semaphor »

signal11 wrote: post #73
rident wrote: post #9

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…

Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. 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,…

> Skype for Business

Which has a horrible UX.

Personally, I use trillian to connect to facebook, jabber and others. But FB is always working hard to make that integration as bad as possible.

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

#118

Post by Semaphor »

skrebbel wrote: post #110
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…

> It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".

Yeah, pretty much no one here (Germany) used AIM, it was 80-90% ICQ and some using MSN.

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

#119

Post by joshlemer »

Skunkleton wrote: post #19

There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org). Yeah, if it takes off then it will just be yet another bit of fragmentation, but at least it is designed in such a way that chats dont get siloed into a single echosystem.

I have to say that, although I began to use Matrix for the open source / open protocol aspects, their flagship client Riot is actually much more fully featured than most other propriety products. For sure it is much more useful than Google Hangouts and I'd say about equal to Slack in terms of user experience and features.

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

#120

Post by thallium205 »

slacka wrote: post #37
CydeWeys wrote: post #27

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.

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 wa…

Franz is the modern day equivalent of Trillian/Pidgin.
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