Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tnhh.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 382 posts

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

#131

Post by corndoge »

dvanduzer wrote: post #122
monksy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want Jabber to succeed, but it looks like all of the social providers don't want this and want to keep your communication on their servers. Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and…

Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now. (I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)

And indeed, an IRC gateway.

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

#132

Post by monksy »

usr1106 wrote: post #104
Spooky23 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Have you tried Skype for Business lately? On Linux it does not even show the screen shared by others (Windows) users. In the old Skype (not for Business) client Linux users could even share. For corporations progress means removing working functionality.

That's been the same situation with webex and Cisco. (Spark is even worse)

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

#133

Post by Pokepokalypse »

ndespres wrote: post #24
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 isn't exactly clear how it's managed from the desktop either. Over the years they've really screwed the whole thing up. It's no longer clear whether someone is online, offline, online but hidden, or just lost in a contact list change reorganization. it also isn't clear whether someone is available to chat, or if the IM I send will be inconveniently received on their mobile phone, something I try to avoid doing whe…

yeah, yahoo did all this same stuff 20 years ago.

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

#134

Post by monksy »

djhworld wrote: post #129

People on here bemoan the loss of XMPP integration and federated access to these platforms, but do Facebook/Google/Microsoft really give that much of a shit about that? I suspect the % of their userbase who wants, let alone understands those features is very small

Yes, the clients suck, and it's a pain to deal with so many different messaging apps.

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

#135

Post by cowpig »

snitko wrote: post #95
oldcynic wrote: post #21

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…

Have you tried Telegram? It's the best.

is this sarcasm? (honestly it's unclear to me)

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

#137

Post by luka-birsa »

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,…

There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative.

Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.

On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS.

I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough.

How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group....

Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.

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

#138

Post by bad_user »

dvanduzer wrote: post #122
monksy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want Jabber to succeed, but it looks like all of the social providers don't want this and want to keep your communication on their servers. Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and…

Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now. (I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)

They don’t do federation. And it doesn’t work very well.

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

#139

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

adrianN wrote: post #75
yeukhon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used Trillian back then on Windows.

Same. Messengers used to just work, now we have a bunch of walked off shit with no intercommunication. "Are you on Slack / Discord / Skype / Telegram?" question is getting pretty annoying.

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

#140

Post by commandar »

jrockway wrote: post #116
signal11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nam…

>Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me.

Mircrosoft's current stab at this is called Teams. I think it actually has potential: it's pretty much a clone of Slack, except that MS is willing to declare it compliant with, e.g., HIPAA.

Post reply on HN