221–230 of 382 posts
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> 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".
Yeah, pretty much no one here (Germany) used AIM, it was 80-90% ICQ and some using MSN.
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
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Have you tried Telegram? It's the best.
See, there's the devil, in the details as usual: "Have you [and everybody you wanted to talk to] tried the X [, all having tried it at the same time]? It's the best [when it works, unless it's subtly and invisibly broken, void where prohibited]."
Either install 27 apps or decide enough is enough. I've had just about enough until one can aggregate like Adium used to.
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…
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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,…
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…
To me it feels like the open standards never really kept up with the times, which in a way paved the way to walled gardens by the giants (and, in case of Slack, not so giants) to fill the gap which the open standards refused to fill.
I mean, sure IRC is awesome, text-only, channels, but emojis are limited to ASCII, inline GIFs are non-existent, and file-sharing (and/or storage) is rather clunky from what I remember from the old times.
And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling (or at least it didn't last time I checked) and it's not very surprising that companies just capitalize on that and make their own platforms.
Don't take me wrong though... it creeps me out how the company where I work trusts Slack with reams and reams of confidential documents, but I guess it's convenient to an extent which no other platform is.
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> 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?
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I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?
in my circle of friends it was because aim let you pick a username instead of a number
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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,…
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…
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 sens…
Edit:
It seems the links do open, but they open silently in one of my minimized browser Windows. And of course it opens in chrome even though my default browser is Safari. Wonderful quality.
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?
Otherwise, no matter what the committee does, it's doomed to fail because there is no incentive to support them.
And given that no one wants interop with their systems (except for some users, but who cares about them?), an interest group is unlikely to appear.