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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?

#261

Post by ossguy »

nextos wrote: post #254
cornholio wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Such a meta XEP exists already: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html#im

If you use a client that conforms to the Advanced Client requirements of the IM and Mobile Compliance Suites (with a similarly up-to-par server), you will have a very good experience.

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

#262

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

And this is what happened back in the day. AOL was forced to add interoperability with competitors. But our government today is unwilling to step in front of corporations on behalf of the people.

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

#263

Post by smt88 »

vxNsr wrote: post #94
smt88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.

Unfortunately, they recently remembered they have it and have begun removing features and options.

This sounds like a cynical joke, but for those people who don't use Voice, it's sadly what's really happening.

I want to get off Google products for many reasons, but the main reason is becoming that I can't trust them to listen to users.

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

#264

Post by eru »

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,…

Rest assured, Googlers mostly saw the same thing, and asked the same question "what are product managers thinking?".

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

#265

Post by zbentley »

amelius wrote: post #218
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?

In the business space, there was a consortium of companies/contributors that got together to try to solve enterprise messaging (not IM/person-to-person messaging, but messaging computers/message buses/queues/etc.)

That consortium created AMQP, which is a fucking abomination of a protocol. You can read through the spec and see the design-by-committee chimeric parts.

I'm not convinced that it's a good approach, basically.

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

#266

Post by detaro »

ossguy wrote: post #261
nextos wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such a meta XEP exists already: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html#im If you use a client that conforms to the Advanced Client requirements of the IM and Mobile Compliance Suites (with a similarly up-to-par server), you will have a very good experience.

Recommendations for good clients for desktop systems? Maybe my google-fu is particularly weak today, but I couldn't find a clear statements which clients outside conversations.im fullfill those (obviously only the IM suite, since mobile wouldn't apply)

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

#267

Post by ossguy »

detaro wrote: post #266
ossguy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a meta XEP exists already: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html#im If you use a client that conforms to the Advanced Client requirements of the IM and Mobile Compliance Suites (with a similarly up-to-par server), you will have a very good experience.

Recommendations for good clients for desktop systems? Maybe my google-fu is particularly weak today, but I couldn't find a clear statements which clients outside conversations.im fullfill those (obviously only the IM suite, since mobile wouldn't apply)

https://gajim.org/ tends to be best for desktop (binaries exist for most desktop OSes).

For macOS, you may want to try Adium or Psi. Or you can use https://movim.eu/ which, though a web client, has fairly good feature support as well.

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

#268

Post by mistermann »

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 just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers.

The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.

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

#269

Post by Vinnl »

jhasse wrote: post #243
Vinnl wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do need one to set it up, right? I had to scan a QR code displayed on my desktop with my phone. (I could continue to use the desktop app while my phone was being repaired, though, which was great.)

No, you can do the complete setup with the Telegram desktop app, but you need a device which can receive SMS or a phone call.

Oh hmm, looks like I got tangled in the threads - I thought we were discussing Signal. My bad!

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

#270

Post by eitally »

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…

The reason they "killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem" is because all the other messaging products had decided to move away from an open standard (XMPP/jabber) to proprietary protocols, so there wasn't much point in restricting Google's own ability to innovate around their chat product by keeping it tied to XMPP. We can argue whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't purely Google being a bad citizen.
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