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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?

#371

Post by stordoff »

slacka wrote: post #37
CydeWeys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good. The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have wa…

I remember setting up Trillian (later Pidgin) and setting up a bunch of accounts just in case I had a use for them - not sure I ever used AIM/ICQ, but I _could_.

Now it's just more trouble than it's worth.

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

#372

Post by nksadakk »

zimpenfish wrote: post #363
philwelch wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A in AOL used to stand for America, but now AOL doesn't stand for anything, much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky.

> much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky. It always did (they just weren't going to pay Kentucky for their fraudulent trademark) and still does - https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp > In November 2006, KFC and the State of Kentucky finally reached an undisclosed settlement over the former’s use of the trademarked word “Kentucky,” and the restaurant chain announced it would be resuming its former name of “K…

From the "More information about this page" link at the bottom of that Snopes page:

> You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome.

> Everything in this section is a spoof.... As for Mississippi’s doing away with teaching fractions and decimals in its school systems because kids find them too hard to master, that’s no more true than Kentucky’s imposing a licensing fee on uses of its name

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

#373

Post by unexistance »

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,…

the relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1810/

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

#374

Post by pasbesoin »

chendragon wrote: post #143
pasbesoin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they started pushing Duo and whatever the other piece of the associated current Google chat/conference... duopoly, is. Supposedly with some move away from and/or deprecation of Hangouts, not to mention the explicit language and dates WRT killing Talk. Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is. I just use non-Google stuff, now, for cha…

Facebook Messenger Web is becoming unusable. Back in 2015 it was great, but slowly, they made it so that the website lags in all browsers if more than 100 messages are on screen, and the scrolling is now wonky.

Ah. I haven't used it on desktop in a couple of years. And even then, I wasn't actually "signing in" to it. It still worked just fine, via Facebook's page(s), so why bother, and this also seemed to avoid their announcing your online status.

On mobile, if you don't know how else to reach out to someone, Messenger's your best chance. Closest thing to a modern-day AIM that I've seen, in terms of ubiquity.

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

#375

Post by mistermann »

JBReefer wrote: post #370
mistermann wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched to what though?

DuckDuckGo is really good - maybe where Google was a year ago but without the user tracking. Also, bangs are awesome.

Search results are as good? If so maybe I'll try, I've basically gotten to the point that I could sider google to be mostly evil.

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

#376

Post by zimpenfish »

nksadakk wrote: post #372
zimpenfish wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky. It always did (they just weren't going to pay Kentucky for their fraudulent trademark) and still does - https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp > In November 2006, KFC and the State of Kentucky finally reached an undisclosed settlement over the former’s use of the trademarked word “Kentucky,” and the restaurant chain announced it would be resuming its former name of “K…

From the "More information about this page" link at the bottom of that Snopes page: > You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome. > Everything in this section is a spoof.... As for Mississippi’s doing away with teaching fractions and decimals in its school systems because kids find them too hard to master, that’s no more true than Kentucky’s imposing a licensing fee on uses of its name

Well, damn. I (correctly) feel a right old fool now. Thanks!

(Sadly I can no longer edit the original otherwise I would add a Mea Culpa.)

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

#377

Post by harryf »

hedora wrote: post #333
username223 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing really good software takes years of user feedback, and a team of knowledgeable engineers digesting that feedback to write new versions. A company can afford to do that when its users are its customers. When they are its product instead, you get a steady stream of half-baked and quickly-abandoned software, often installed via forced update.

Most of the industry has settled on the CADT model instead. The GP of this post suggests Google has done a particularly good job formalizing it these days. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Did you try that link when HN is the referrer? ;)

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

#378

Post by seba_dos1 »

hota_mazi wrote: post #255
luka-birsa wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack provides IRC relay, which initially was almost feature complete, but got out of date with time.

Anyway, in some time Slack will probably fade away as quickly as it appeared, further contributing to the problem grandparent noticed and you seem to misunderstand.

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

#379

Post by eru »

pja wrote: post #305
eru wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, I was mostly thinking about bystanding Googlers not working on hangouts.

Your description is reasonable for people working on a project. (But even inside hangouts there was dissent. I don't know too much about the specifics, and probably wouldn't be allowed to tell, if I did..)

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

#380

Post by fulafel »

tiagoespinha wrote: post #225
luka-birsa wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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…

What would be the advantage of adding tighter voice/video support to XMPP, vs just using links to sip: URIs? A major point of open standards is that you can use use them together with other open standards.
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