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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?

#251

Post by Spoom »

rident wrote: post #231
pr3dr49 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/

Matrix [1], mentioned elsewhere in these comments, looks interesting too and the Riot [2] app is similarly styled to Slack. [1] https://matrix.org/ [2] https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org

Matrix is basically open source Slack. It fixes a lot of the problems that IRC had, enabling continuous presence, central authentication, easy file transfer, bot integrations, and more. I really hope it catches on more.

Disclaimer: I help run a small Matrix network.

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

#252

Post by EdwardDiego »

eridius wrote: post #39
rident wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473

Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?

They have, but they don't seem to be in favour of it.

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

#253

Post by m_mueller »

Spooky23 wrote: post #235
m_mueller wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is going on with groupware? IBM, MS, Google, are they all just befuddled by whatever web fad is current to forget making their stuff actually useful? I feel like there has been nothing but regression since 10 years, ever since Skype brought free and stable group calls.

It’s funny you said that. One of my colleagues pointed out that the IM client from Exchange 2003 era (I think it was Live Communications Server) and LiveMeeting were a better collaboration platform than SfB, even given the severe limitations on bandwidth and cpu.

It's really not a high bar is it? Frickin MSN Messenger and Adium was a better platform than what we have now. While never having used it I suspect the best was probably blackberry's platform in its heyday, even though AFAIK complicated to integrate into a business, but at least then it would work solidly.

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

#254

Post by nextos »

cornholio wrote: post #234
tiagoespinha wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. 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…

> And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler…

XMPP is a bit complex, and suffers from some problems derived from too much flexibility. The mandatory part of the protocol is too small. This could be fixed by creating a meta XEP that lists all XEPs needed by modern clients.

However, it's a very capable protocol. Just see how nice conversations.im is. It doesn't even use GCM, and both latency and energy usage are fantastic.

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

#255

Post by hota_mazi »

luka-birsa wrote: post #137
signal11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens

Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol.

It's all about product design and user interface.

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

#256

Post by m-p-3 »

Agreed with most of the points in the article. Google Talk was minimalistic, but that was the whole point of it. And it was in a point of time where Google actually tried to use an open protocol which was interoperable and extendable.

I could use Google Talk in Pidgin along will all my other IM accounts within the same client, and I also could use some plugins like OTR to encrypt my conversation if I needed to.

Now we're forced to use the Hangouts client which frankly isn't very good, and everyone else is also trying to lock everyone in their platform by putting interoperability on ice.

XMPP is still a good protocol, but no one seems to care :(

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

#257

Post by dmitriid »

upofadown wrote: post #213
dmitriid wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> Yeah and email doesn't have hardly of those features either

That's why:

- there have been countless attempts to improve email (anything from threading, to automatic contact info to inline images to file previews, to adding interactivity to emails, to... to...)

- the younger generation prefers anything but email

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

#258

Post by epicide »

nvarsj wrote: post #247

What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a great product. Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity. There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many ir…

Google makes money off of data. Essentially, they are a big ad company that does tech. Whatever that means to you, that's generally how they make money. The more of your data that they can have going through their services, the better.

All of their "products"/tools (at least after a certain point) have this end in mind. If a product does not get them enough data[0], they either a) bastardize it until it does, or b) kill it.

I'm sure this is not news to a lot of people, but it surprises me how often people forget that Google has no reason to care about the quality of their tools as long as enough people are using it. I'm not saying they don't make good tools, but that is why we see good tools get killed (Reader, Wave) or ruined (Hangouts, Voice).

[0]: or they can't figure out a good way to get good ad data from it.

EDIT: formatting.

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

#259

Post by JosephRedfern »

tiagoespinha wrote: post #226
exikyut wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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?

Your phone connects to WhatsApp's servers. So does your laptop. The bridging is likely done server-side. I assume this is done because WhatsApp is (probably) using end-to-end encryption, so everything must be ran by your phone (which is the only place where your private key is stored) in order to encrypt the messages.

It works impressively well, though -- I use it far more than I do the mobile client directly.

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

#260

Post by kilroy123 »

intellegacy wrote: post #90

you guys want to talk about frustration and pain from hangouts? pffff, try this: an important new client calls you on your google voice number, which routs to hangouts. You don't yet have their number as it isn't in your Google Contacts or your Phone Contacts. You answer, but are busy, or need to look up something for them, and you tell them you'll call them right back. You get the info you need and you look to your…

This is why I have my Google voice number forward to another platform.
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