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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?

#161

Post by OkGoDoIt »

yeukhon wrote: post #53
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.

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 Pidgin on Windows for years. Ah, the good old days...

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

#162

Post by promopacket »

bitL wrote: post #127

A typical process at a big corp: Initial small enthusiastic team has a cool idea, works day and night, having a lot of fun on the project. They release it, it's cool, useful and everybody loves it. Then after a while original team members get bored or focus on other interests, move out of the team and new team members come in. Those team members aren't necessarily worse than the original ones, but have to maintain th…

Agree that it happens, and think this case is different.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137

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

#163

Post by jhasse »

pixelpoet wrote: post #154

Just want to say thank you for writing this and bringing it to HN attention. Gtalk was absolutely amazing, and you could even send files to your friends just so , just drag it into the window! It's 2018 and this functionality is hardly available anywhere anymore.

Telegram's Desktop client has this functionality.

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

#164

Post by Piskvorrr »

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…

Reasonable, mmkay? Every other webapp-in-a-wrapper seems to go the Win95 way, which was "mine is the only app on the whole computer, let's just hog all the resources!" Nowadays they must be mining bitcoin or whatever, because I don't see what else a messaging app needs a whole core for its entire runtime (looking at you, Slack Desktop).

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

#166

Post by techsupporter »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
busterarm wrote: post #147

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 pre…

> Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours. And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. At this point I'm actually waiting for someone to "innovate" a way to dynamically sign EULAs with the same API calls you'd use to get access tokens, just to add insult to injury...

> And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA.

And it's guaranteed to have some damned binding arbitration clause[0], if it comes from a company based in the United States, so when[1] everything that company knows about you is "unintentionally" transmitted to every hacker and script kiddy with a modicum of PHP knowledge, you can't even band together and financially ruin the company. Not that you'd be able to get anything out of them, anyway, since 90% of them are so knee-deep in venture capital money that you'd be 9,392nd in line behind the likes Sequoia, Andreessen, Y Combinator, and Honest Achmend's Certificate Authority and Investing Company.

I guess I'm getting old but, damn, I'm really starting to hate the corporate Internet.

0 - I loathe every single one of you who has ever posted on a Hacker News thread about how horrible binding arbitration clauses are and who are also founders/CEOs/operators of companies with binding arbitration clauses in your terms of service. This goes quadruple for companies that are B2C. I do not care if "everyone else is doing it" or your "lawyers recommended it." Grow a spine and delete the clause if it's so awful. Go first. Be bold. Half points for burying an opt-out that requires faxing a notarized statement to a phone number in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. That's better than nothing.

1 - It's not "if" anymore, it's when.

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

#167

Post by tyfon »

Freak_NL wrote: post #152
luka-birsa wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.

I'm using Signal on my linux desktop right now. It appears to be a packaged webpage but it works fine and is linked to my phone and laptop.

All it require is a phone number, besides it's Snowden approved :)

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

#168

Post by baddox »

ndespres wrote: post #31
baddox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did presence ever really work though? I’ve been online since the late 90s and I don’t remember ever considering it reliable except perhaps for people on IRC who I knew had a transient internet connection (namely dialup). I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar). It’s kind of funny, considering t…

AIM handled presence quite well- custom "away" messages, easily editable "profiles" which were like a .plan file to include a note about where you were logged in, idle timers, icon to tell if an IM was forwarded to a cell phone. Finally while it lacked anything like Slack has to store your messages centrally and persistently, AIM would notify a user when you logged on to more than one location and allow remote logoff…

It’s interesting that your iMessage experience is much worse than mine. I’ve seen some weird behavior, but generally only on very spotty connections.

Facebook Messenger definitely does the best job. I believe it shows the delivery status of every single message.

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

#169

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Very US-centric view. In the UK everyone used MSN (well, people that actually used IM did) and now literally everyone uses WhatsApp. Even my technologically illiterate mum uses WhatsApp.

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

#170

Post by philwelch »

abtinf wrote: post #130
skrebbel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Pedantic nitpicking: The A in AIM stands for AOL. The A in AOL stands for America.

The A in AOL used to stand for America, but now AOL doesn't stand for anything, much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky.
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