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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?

#181

Post by pmlnr »

whateveruser wrote: post #160
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…

Perhaps try Skype lite? It has almost zero bloat, and has been working flawlessly for all my needs.

It that like the Facebook Lite app that's geofenced to emerging countries? How bloated an app has to be to make a company with the size of M$ to create an alternative client?

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

#182

Post by verylittlemeat »

ryanplant-au wrote: post #142
yborg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes Discord is starting to really starting to dominate.

More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.

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

#183

Post by macspoofing »

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

That was never true. AIM was very popular in some places and had no foothold in others. In my area it was first ICQ and later MSN. Nobody, except one buddy from Seattle, used AIM.

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

#184

Post by dmytroi »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #177
jhasse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country.

- [0] https://hitta.se

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

#186

Post by colordrops »

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 :)

They lose all credibility when they force you to reveal your phone number. Doesn't matter who endorses it.

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

#187

Post by fauigerzigerk »

dmytroi wrote: post #184
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se

Yes, what I meant to say is that the SIM card is tied to exactly one telco at any particular time. It's also tied to one device at a time.

Perhaps one of the virtual SIM card offerings would work with Signal though.

I'm juggling too many SIM cards and phones already. I don't want any new dependencies that complicate matters further.

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

#188

Post by busterarm »

techsupporter wrote: post #166
TeMPOraL wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Unfortunately, spines were delaying the release and that feature was cut.

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

#189

Post by yason »

I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of the problems decribed in the article. Yes, the video chat was choppy but so was any other video call at the time; I still managed to talk to my wife over video on business trips so it wasn't unusable. I still like the Gmail chat that you can pop up into a separate window. It's fast and reliable.

However, the issue with Hangouts is that I don't have people there anymore. I talk to 1-2 friends on Hangouts who refuse to use Facebook or Whatsapp. That's all nice but ten years ago I had a significant portion of my friends in Google Talk. They still have Gmail accounts but they chat elsewhere.

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

#190

Post by harryf »

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 may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers.

As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare.

After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly, leading to ignored user feedback and a struggle make improvements.

The product mothballs for some years until - in the case of something like Google Talk - momentum is generated around replacing it with the next 1.0 product.

And so on...

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