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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?

#321

Post by Shoothe »

nkoren wrote: post #275

The rationale for Google's behaviour has always been that it will help them achieve user lock-in. But disregarding both the technical and ethical merits of this strategy... is it actually working for them? Six years ago I spent very significant proportion of my time using Talk and Reader. In their absence, I have shifted to using FB Messenger (/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc.), with Facebook and Hacker News kinda substituting…

I can relate to this. Google's services became less and less useful over time. I even replaced Hangouts with self-hosted XMPP server while previously I thought custom would mean a lot of trouble. After a while test driving it I migrated entire family (Conversations.im on Android works great and we've got encrypted E2E chats).

Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).

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

#322

Post by carapace »

I worked at Google. An observation:

The internal codebase should be structured like the yellow-pages of a phonebook[1] but instead it's structured like a flea market.

Now, consider that in light of Conway's Law[2]...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook

[2] http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

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

#323

Post by notyourwork »

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.

This is the sad part about today. We lost user centricity with the dawn of mobile apps.

The web (http) and internet were conduits for information and communication. Now the pipe is a dumb channel each companies territory.

I miss pidgin where you had AIM, ICQ, IRC, Gtalk and whatever others. I also miss how companies are pushing their app instead of improving their mobile presence on the web.

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

#324

Post by Shoothe »

rident wrote: post #276
eitally wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was…

Sure there were other and earlier offenders, but that doesn't mean Google had to follow suit. They could have contributed something open and federated - an upgrade to XMPP. Branding would have been easy and the darling of the web would have held that image a little longer. But they didn't, the closing and interconnecting of Google's product ecosystem was the beginning of a trend which is now seen across most of their…

Sadly that's also my thoughts about Google. When previously they were open and leading the innovation now they are just blindly copying competition in hope of somehow making it big. Twitter? Google Buzz... Didn't work. Facebook? Google+... Didn't work. Whatsapp? Allo... Didn't work.

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

#325

Post by BenjiWiebe »

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.

To be really pedantic; a smartphone is not required for WhatsApp. You can activate a Google voice number with a landline, then use your Google voice number to activate WhatsApp running in BlueStacks or your emulator of choice.

Source: I did this for a few months. I'm not quite sure why...

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

#326

Post by fauigerzigerk »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #317
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Threema appears to optionally do the exact same thing. Signal eschews the flexibility to ensure more universal usability by being able to assume that anyone who uses signal can be associated with their phone number. An assumption that holds for the vast vast majority of potential users.

I don't see how making phone numbers mandatory makes Signal easier to use at all. There must be another reason for this restriction. Some say it's for spam protection.

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

#327

Post by asherdavidson »

donbindner wrote: post #298
jasikpark wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.

Try to go back and delete old conversations.... Discord really falls down there.

They have decent search at least. Lots of filters you can customize. It feels a little janky to use though.

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

#328

Post by delfinom »

Shoothe wrote: post #321
nkoren wrote: post #275

The rationale for Google's behaviour has always been that it will help them achieve user lock-in. But disregarding both the technical and ethical merits of this strategy... is it actually working for them? Six years ago I spent very significant proportion of my time using Talk and Reader. In their absence, I have shifted to using FB Messenger (/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc.), with Facebook and Hacker News kinda substituting…

I can relate to this. Google's services became less and less useful over time. I even replaced Hangouts with self-hosted XMPP server while previously I thought custom would mean a lot of trouble. After a while test driving it I migrated entire family (Conversations.im on Android works great and we've got encrypted E2E chats). Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).

I've been finding Google Calendar incredibly buggy as of late as well as other services. It's like they don't care anymore.

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

#330

Post by jhasse »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #312
jhasse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Incorrect. Whatsapp refuses to open on my iPad and isn't even available in the App Store. The only reason it got on there was a glitch in Apple's app sync which must've auto-downloaded it since I have it on my iPhone.

Sorry, I was talking about Telegram. Should have made that more clear.
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