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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?

#211

Post by analogic »

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…

The best is when as an android user that has an iPad, texts sent to you from an iPhone will go to the iPad that gets opened maybe once a week and not to your phone.

No going half-way into that ecosystem.

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

#212

Post by JoBrad »

CydeWeys wrote: post #27
lobster_johnson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.

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.

You might be forgetting that AIM would change their settings randomly for a few years to prevent unofficial clients from working.

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

#213

Post by upofadown »

dmitriid wrote: post #158
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…

XMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging. There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file u…

Yeah and email doesn't have hardly of those features either. It's basically just text or perhaps HTML. Sending files is super inefficient and awkward. Encryption is hardly supported on clients.

None of that changes the fact that email is a useful and reliable way to send a text message to someone. In the same way XMPP is a useful and reliable way to send a text message to someone. If all you have is a lowest common denominator there is no point in dismissing it for something that doesn't exist.

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

#214

Post by analogic »

bbatha wrote: post #50
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.

Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.

If I move the teams window from one monitor the my other slightly different sized one the close and maximize buttons don't work until the window gets minimized and then re-shown. smh. (win8)

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

#215

Post by exikyut »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #207
jhasse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> A smartphone isnt required It is for Whatsapp. Not only for sign-up, but actually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. The web "session" times out constantly, so I'd have to re-pair it with my phone all the time. If I still decided to use whatsapp.

> [A]ctually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone.

How on earth does that work? Say my phone's on data, my laptop's on my home wifi with NAT. How does Whatsapp on the web reach my phone?

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

#217

Post by Y_Y »

pmlnr wrote: post #181
whateveruser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I (relatively) happily use the Facebook Lite app in Ireland where I got it from Play Store. I'm not sure we're emerging from anything.

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

#218

Post by amelius »

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…

> Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't.

It's a miracle that the web works the way it does. So perhaps we need a consortium (like W3C) for messaging too?

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

#219

Post by oldcynic »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #78
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…

That's been my experience as well. Facebook/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Allo/whatever might have amazing features but I truly don't care. SMS/iMessage (since it's seamlessly integrated) has completely taken over with my group of friends because of one defining feature - everyone has it. If you have a phone number, you can receive a text from me. A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group threa…

Certainly has a big plus - SMS will often get through when even voice can't. Data on the other hand! That's without getting into how badly some apps handle intermittent or no signal.

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

#220

Post by 4ad »

aianus wrote: post #17
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…

I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).

Since October 30 2016, Hangouts is unusable on me on Safari.

I always use the pop-up feature in order to get individual chat windows that are real operating system windows, rather that the javascript windows in Gmail. Since that date, it doesn't work in Safari. It works for a few minutes, then the windows close themselves and disappear.

The only solution was to use Chrome... which worked until very recently. Now I get the same problem with Chrome too, albeit the timeout is much longer, perhaps an hour or so or sometimes longer.

Everything is fucked.

By the way, this is Apple bug 29018740. It might help if someone makes another bug report and references this bug, though I doubt it because when the latest Safari version was released (with the bug still present, of course), I mentioned this to Apple and they responded:

> Thank you for contacting us. If this is still an issue for you on current releases, please file a new bug report.

Thanks Apple.

By the way, this is just for text messaging. For voice/video Hangouts became unusable earlier than that. The video quality is approximately 120p and the audio is 1kbps or less, and I can't talk because noise cancellation doesn't work and I hear myself back with a 2 second delay and 80dB gain. Don't even get me started on CPU utilization yet...

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