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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?

#141

Post by dvanduzer »

bad_user wrote: post #138
dvanduzer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles.

Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)

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

#142

Post by ryanplant-au »

yborg wrote: post #121
craftyguy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's alive, but I don't know about 'doing well'. It survives among some special interest communities, but the usage is tiny compared to any of the major platforms now. You won't find your uncle on it.

To be fair, I wouldn't have found him on IRC in 1998 either. IRC has really always been a relatively niche thing and I think it's fair to say it's doing well if you define that as remaining popular within the niches it's always been associated with. Though I think this is starting to change with the popularity of Discord.

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

#143

Post by chendragon »

pasbesoin wrote: post #54
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…

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…

Facebook Messenger Web is becoming unusable. Back in 2015 it was great, but slowly, they made it so that the website lags in all browsers if more than 100 messages are on screen, and the scrolling is now wonky.

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

#144

Post by TeMPOraL »

thallium205 wrote: post #120
slacka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. That's just yet another instance of web browser, this time with chat-specific tab switching and - as I learned recently - a need to create yet another cloud account...

In Pidgin, you actually had it all in one place, with the UX defined by Pidgin.

That's another bad thing about current fragmentation. You have no way to unify the UX.

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

#145

Post by secabeen »

Fascinating. Within my social circles, we use Hangouts extensively. It still feels a lot like the original Talk for us. The Android app works, on desktop the Chrome extension is solid, I've never lost an important message, and the features he laments the loss of (busy status, XMPP support, off the record, contact blocking) just don't matter to us. I haven't had his experience with adding people (if I want to chat with someone, I input their @gmail.com address, done), message delivery is reliable, multi-media (photos, video) works fine, voice and video calling works, search is in the Gmail we already use, and group chats are easy and straightforward.

My social circle is almost exclusively Android, which may help, although the few iPhone users do work, and a lot of chatting happens through the Chrome extension/gmail window, so there's that.

I don't particularly want to chat through Facebook (Messenger is a busy, ugly mess, and the app is pretty heavyweight) and many of my contacts aren't on Whatsapp or WeChat. SMS often delays message sending and delivery in areas with spotty mobile coverage. Hangouts uses wifi first, which is ubiquitous in our homes and at work.

It's really interesting to see the different perspective. I do worry about the future of Hangouts, it feels like it's just coasting now. Duo/Allo/Meet may be an okay replacement, if they migrate all of the data over and swap it in Gmail. I've played with their slack-competitor (Chat), and it's interesting. Still doesn't feel as good as slack, but it's been okay.

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

#146

Post by guitarbill »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #43
bronson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suspect you wouldn't been downvoted so far if there was a sarcasm marker on this, of some sort.

Wait, is using more than one question mark not an internationally recognised sarcasm marker???

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

#147

Post by busterarm »

We used to have a relatively open internet based on developing, using an adhering to protocols and open standards. This is probably because everything was new and there was a lot of money on the table for everyone.

We would joke about peoples' theories of the "Balkanization of the Internet" and mostly we would look at it from the wrong angle (nation states).

Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours.

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

#148

Post by SyneRyder »

dvanduzer wrote: post #123
thinkloop wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?

AOL bought them. Slow burn.

ICQ is now owned by the Russian company behind Mail.RU. AOL sold it for $187.5 million, less than half what they paid for it:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...

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

#149

Post by TeMPOraL »

dvanduzer wrote: post #126
ChuckMcM wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that nobody has figured out how to make money on it and that is what is 'going on'. It does make one ponder how to do this stuff in a sustainable way.

Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an acquisition target for those companies. edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones, WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.

Calling Slack "interoperable" is a bit much to me, though I admit it's better than everyone else in the "new crowd".

I wonder if we need a new word for "interoperability in the time of SaaS" - the kind of where SaaSes talk to other SaaSes via locked down APIs, under absolute control of the vendor.

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

#150

Post by Piskvorrr »

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…

IIRC, AIM required you to have AOL as your ISP. Even where applicable (i.e. in USA), this was still inconvenient until they dropped this requirement sometime in 2000. Other, ISP-independent messengers existed before, but the pastoral idyll of "everyone at the same chat network" never existed in reality.
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