211–220 of 402 posts
What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To which many would reply, "Yes, I can Skype with you. I am at work, so I'll be using my Skype for Business program which recently replaced Lync. My Skype will talk to yours, right? Oh it says here that Skype for Business (which used to be Lync (which used to be Office Communicator)), is now Teams, so uhh can you just call me on my phone instead. Thanks
Skype for Business and Teams are not the same app. That said, I've found Teams very lacking in exactly the way Skype is not, and Skype lacking in exactly the way Teams is not which is very frustrating.
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.
What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.
Personally, you've burned me too many times, in this domain. I won't be looking at your products, going forward.
(My last phone came with a Duo icon pre-installed on the home screen. I felt an active aversion to clicking it; that persisted, and I never have.)
P.S. In retrospect, killing XMPP inter-operability was indeed a harbinger of the larger sh-t-show.
I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling? For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it ( http://partytime.jmistri.com ). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great h…
https://meet.jit.si/
This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. 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 ear…
Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.
The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough.
Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.
This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. 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 ear…
Messages iMessage
Duo Facetime
Hangouts Slack
I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.