161–170 of 402 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopping from text to video in a single click is cool... But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage". iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly. I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening an…
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In what world do Google product people live these days?
If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.
Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO. https://messages.android.com/
Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.
The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words. Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with fami…
Hopping from text to video in a single click is cool... But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage". iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly. I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening an…
What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago?
Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY?
Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable reason, since about 6 years ago, I can't quite ever figure out how to open or close the "hangouts" application, and google just keeps making it more confusing.
It started out pretty sane: either use the mobile site in gmail.com, or open the (beautiful, fast, stable) google talk desktop application. Eventually the desktop application got deprecated, and I HAD to use chrome, but that was essentially okay since it had some nice features. It would dock messages to the bottom of your browser, which was cool.
But at some point, google deprecated that, and won't even let you run the old version of it anymore. Now you HAVE to either use gmail.com, or some application that can only seemingly run if chrome (a giant memory hog) is also running. Oh and for some reason the mobile version of the application wants to send SMS messages? But like sometimes it's SMS but sometimes it isn't, an it's not really obvious which is which??!?
All of this messaging stuff is seriously driving me crazy. In what world does it make sense that facebook messenger is somehow the easiest, most stable messaging client? WTF? If we could all just agree to start using AIM again, and if they could get file transfers and voice chat working 100%...my god. It would be amazing. And imagine how fast it would run on modern hardware!
Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.
Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations. Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messin…
How are they still getting this wrong. One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.