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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?

#301

Post by pault »

lkrubner wrote: post #282

When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike? I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actuall…

I've migrated off Google services as much as possible over the last six months; I use Duck Duck Go for searches, and fastmail for email with my own domain. I also use the fastmail client's built in calendar. So far I've only had to fall back to a Google search a few times in six months, and the fastmail client is light years behind gmail inbox and gcal, but it's fine for my usage patterns. A year ago I was spending half of every day on a google service, now I barely touch them.

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

#302

Post by rjbwork »

verylittlemeat wrote: post #182
ryanplant-au wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that work? I'm a regular in the C# Discord community and one of the rules we enforce and have to enforce regularly is no illegal or shifty activity (pirating, cracking, hacking, aimbots, cheating, etc.) because the discord admins don't take kindly to that sort of thing.

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

#303

Post by dmix »

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…

> I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players

Sounds good on paper, sure, but ultimately it will end up being a predictable bureaucratic mess, causing more harm than good:

a) The mandatory 'open' standard that gets produced will end up being designed by committees of management teams from 6-7 major companies, each with their own list of feature requests and no central 'vision'.

b) A lack of a cohesive strategy and (critically) a lack of real incentives by the members to partake will result in endless delays, slow moving technological progress, layers of old cruft that never gets removed, and toxic political infighting causing confusion among vendors.

c) The standard ends up being so complex and involved that it isolates other small/medium sized players (or large foreign players) from joining in, eliminating the 'openness' the original regulation envisioned and crippling competition.

d) Ultimately reduces the ability for developers to get paid via monetization and grow via capital investments in the US, as non-regulated open-source projects (or foreign private apps) gain a major advantage of not having to be forced to use the standard. Cannibalizing the market the big players spent so much time/money building.

It's not just about good intentions and spotting a tough problem, it's about whether they can realistically and effectively achieve the end goals...

TLDR: open-source and the global nature of technology, lack of incentives, design by committee, regulatory agencies staffed by the very same companies it's regulating, etc, etc will result in the crippling of innovation and harm the quality of chat apps in the US.

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

#304

Post by fauigerzigerk »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #295
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I still need to keep the SIM card active or I could never switch phones (or reinstall the phone OS) without losing my Signal identity. I cannot ever let go of the phone number I used to activate Signal. In practice, that means I need to keep paying for a phone tariff I may no longer want.

True. I was assuming most people have at least one phone number they want to keep long term (even if it's not always active with their cell). Note though that signal will also work fine with non-traditional services that provide free or much cheaper phone numbers like google voice (US), skype, or twilio. It is true though that you do need to maintain a phone number. That is one of the trade-offs they made to allow it…

How does the phone number tie-in make it usable? Phone numbers and SIM cards are about the most user hostile thing I can possibly think of.

What's wrong with the way Threema does it for instance, which is essentially to bind the identity to a key pair that you can back up?

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

#305

Post by pja »

eru wrote: post #264
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,…

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

They were probably thinking "How many features do I need to claim responsibility for in order to get that next salary / stock option boost?"

By default feature creep tends to win out over less visible improvements: supporting the latter requires active effort from management.

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

#306

Post by j0hnml »

pault wrote: post #301
lkrubner wrote: post #282

When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike? I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actuall…

I've migrated off Google services as much as possible over the last six months; I use Duck Duck Go for searches, and fastmail for email with my own domain. I also use the fastmail client's built in calendar. So far I've only had to fall back to a Google search a few times in six months, and the fastmail client is light years behind gmail inbox and gcal, but it's fine for my usage patterns. A year ago I was spending h…

This seems to be a common and popular trend these days, especially on HN. Is anyone doing the opposite and becoming more ingrained into the Google ecosystem?

I'd love to dive more into the Android/Google side of things, but these sentiments are (unfortunately) making me think twice about doing so. I'd like to read different perspectives if they are out there.

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

#307

Post by dbdr »

amedvednikov wrote: post #240
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,…

I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.

Sounds impressive. Unfortunate timing that the new version is not out yet, but if it needs final touches then it does ;)

Did you consider open-sourcing it? More people would probably be willing to give it a try and support you on patreon if it was.

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

#309

Post by Skunkleton »

joshlemer wrote: post #119
Skunkleton wrote: post #19

There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org). Yeah, if it takes off then it will just be yet another bit of fragmentation, but at least it is designed in such a way that chats dont get siloed into a single echosystem.

I have to say that, although I began to use Matrix for the open source / open protocol aspects, their flagship client Riot is actually much more fully featured than most other propriety products. For sure it is much more useful than Google Hangouts and I'd say about equal to Slack in terms of user experience and features.

Riot is impressive, especially for something so new. Equally impressive is how trivial it is to create plugins to bridge to other protocols. For example: https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-Bridge/blob/mas...

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

#310

Post by cornholio »

dmix wrote: post #303
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…

> I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players Sounds good on paper, sure, but ultimately it will end up being a predictable bureaucratic mess, causing more harm than good: a) The mandatory 'open' standard that gets produced will end up being designed by committees of management teams from 6-7 major companies, each with their own list of feature…

I don't expect US to move a finger on the issue - all major players are american. However, something like USB charging was imposed by the EU with great success, ending a massive source of e-waste and proprietary cruft manufacturers imposed onto consumers. For EU, the economic motivations to force american companies open to European competition would be very tempting and the consumer benefits significant.

The takeaway from the USB success is not to design a new protocol by committee, rather pick a mature open standard - for textual chats there are several mature ones.

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