321–330 of 402 posts
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This is a great behind the scenes view. What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).
Social was the department that was running Google+ and Hangout, and at one point I think Youtube fell under its control as well? Vic Gundotra was the SVP who ran it. Despite my mixed feelings toward products from Social I had a lot of respect for Vic.
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…
(Googler also, also unrelated product) I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed…
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> Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. > I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?
> No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I…
It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.
Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gami…
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> Google's only product is advertising, Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising. Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...)…
A nit: afaik Google's DNS service has committed to never associating data with other Google services. For reference, it's the last bullet point on https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq
I would take that (as anything else) with a grain of salt. They might not today, but things change and they might tomorrow (you know, they used to "not be evil" and they aren't anymore).
Furthermore, rest assured that everyone who can, which includes - but is not limited to - three letter agencies, is monitoring traffic into 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
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I can't deal with how signal desktop works. I DO NOT want messaging tied to my phone. I want it tied to an account that works wherever I sign in. I'd love to use Signal, but can't deal with that.
You want XMPP or Matrix.
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I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth. >Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from t…
This is a great behind the scenes view. What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).
As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure.
To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many hiccups.
Of course, after the G+ effort disintegrated... we got Allo & Duo
You do realize, Google, that most of us are simply not listening to you any more, on this topic? 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…