How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by jasikpark » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

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,…

Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.

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

#172

Post by balladeer » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

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 had signed up for Telegram on a phone, so can't say whether you can sign up w/o a phone (I think it would require SMS verification).

It doesn't need you to be logged in on any phone however. You can use just the desktop app. In fact I am on some really crowded and hyperactive Telegram groups so can't even imagine keeping it on my phone. Besides not a single one of my IRL friends use Telegram. I see 3-4 names, maybe they had signed up once.

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

#173

Post by mastazi » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

I use Google Hangouts from time to time, not my favourite IM app but some of the criticism in the article is inaccurate. I can definitely tell when someone is online (article says you can't), and I have been using the desktop app for a while (article says there is no desktop app).

Note: the desktop app doesn't seem to be native (I think I got it from the Chrome store) however it's definitely a desktop app in the sense that you can run it without having a browser open.

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

#174

Post by a-dub » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

It's funny how this seems to happen to chat systems over and over. Google Talk, Skype for Business, ICQ... They start out pretty good, but then the simplicity gets abandoned by what appears to be really awful committee driven product design decisions until they basically become unusable.

Maybe their inherent simplicity makes them the ultimate bike shed.

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

#175

Post by _kwmj » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

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,…

WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.

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

#176

Post by toyg » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

commandar wrote: post #140

jrockway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Teams is a cross between Slack and Facebook. It has channels, but also a threaded-messages structure that is just painful. Everybody in the company I work for wants to like it, but they struggle. Slack would be so much better, but then we’d lose Sharepoint and AD integration and we’d have Yet Another Silo We Have To Pay For.

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

#177

Post by fauigerzigerk » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

jhasse wrote: post #157

Freak_NL wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.

The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties.

Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.

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

#178

Post by dvanduzer » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 10:02 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149

dvanduzer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS. Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable" specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing when talking about SaaS.

In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model... Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.

I recommend this recent nested Twitter ("new crowd") thread amongst Stewart Butterfield and many other early web folk, about whether Slack is a web app: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/961704310613491712

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

#179

Post by dorgo » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 10:11 AM UTC

commandar wrote: post #140

jrockway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Teams is a nightmare. Buggy, slow UI (I suspect that they use their browser internally), annoying. They started to worsen Skype too, but it is stil heaven in comparison. I suspect that they make bad UX on purpose. No way to release such a bad IM client by accident.

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

#180

Post by pmlnr » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 10:22 AM UTC

tyfon wrote: post #167

Freak_NL wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

You're using signal in a browser on your linux desktop. Poke me when there's any way to connect via bitlbee or libpurple, like there is for ICQ, jabber, etc.