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Talko

talko.com

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Re: Talko

#11

Post by [deleted] »

swartkrans wrote: post #9
georgemcbay wrote: post #2

Awesome, a smartphone app that allows me to communicate with people via voice. This might be exactly the killer app that mobile phones have been waiting for.

WhatsApp and Line are multi-billion dollar companies that replaced a simple thing phones could already do. Laughing and making sarcastic jokes at something that makes voice mail better and easier with a nice UI by a proven competent individual is probably the wrong response to make, especially when the UI and features look pretty gangbuster. A little bit of polish and better ease of use can make whole lot of people h…

[deleted]

Re: Talko

#12

Post by downandout »

georgemcbay wrote: post #2

Awesome, a smartphone app that allows me to communicate with people via voice. This might be exactly the killer app that mobile phones have been waiting for.

I had the same thought when I first saw Uber. "I have the number for XYZ taxi/limo service programmed into my phone. What's so special here?". To the vast majority of people, a better interface for doing something they already do is itself a killer app. Ask a teenager how often they email their friends. They'll laugh at you. Why? Because Snapchat and Instagram are better interfaces for communicating the things they want than traditional email.

Talko is arguably a better interface than most professionals use for many aspects of communications, so they have at least a reasonable chance of success.

Re: Talko

#13

Post by neolefty »

I haven't used Talko, but it sounds like a converged communication app, kind of Wave-ish, combining real-time (talk, chat) asynchronous (like email) and an archive organized by conversation.

Plus convenient and easy?

Is that right?

Re: Talko

#14

Post by EdSharkey »

Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronaut rants do, perhaps unfairly in this case, immediately spring to my mind. Especially as Joel calls out Ray Ozzie by-name ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

Communications applications have to be extremely hard to pull off successfully, and God bless Ozzie for trying again.

I'm tempted to spout off on how one would do this thing "right", but I think that would make me the astronaut pot calling the architect kettle black.

Re: Talko

#15

Post by justinpaulson »

gonehome wrote: post #10

Voice isn't the clearest or the fastest way to communicate. I'd suggest the opposite - that's it's slow, unclear and probably the worst form of digital communication. There's no good log, it's not silent, you can't link to other information (or copy it) and it requires one person to stop talking before another can start. This all aside, iOS 8 now let's you send voice messages in the default messages app - seems like…

I came to say this, but also wanted to add that searching a voice communication is quite problematic compared to a written conversation. For evidence of how unclear it is, just look at the amount of times journalists use brackets to clean up quotations because people tend to speak in broken fragments.

Re: Talko

#17

Post by natch »

It seems like a cheap shot, but it has to be said: I'm having trouble seeing what this provides that iMessage doesn't provide already:

- Text, check.

- Pictures and videos, check.

- Group messaging, check.

- Voice messaging, check.

It sounds like they recreated the iMessage core features, other than the ability to fall back to SMS for text. I wonder about privacy protection. Maybe there are some other bells and whistles on top?

Re: Talko

#18

Post by taspeotis »

My opinion of this application is as follows, and nothing on the page really convinces me that my perception of the application is wrong so I have very little impetus to install it and find out how right or wrong I am.

First impression is it's a nice, professional and polished application but it's an application that makes noise. Which means (on my iPhone):

* When I'm listening to music with my headphones on and some communication comes in from this app, it's going to be via voice and my music will fade out.

* When I open the app it's going to initialise the sound device even though it doesn't need to make sound just yet and my music will fade out just by opening the app. (Not guaranteed: a lot of apps do this, this one could too.)

* When this app starts playing instead of my music it's going to confuse my car's entertainment system and my music won't start again. (This problem is specific to my car.)

Basically this app is going to be annoying in ways that iMessage and email are not.

Re: Talko

#19

Post by noblethrasher »

EdSharkey wrote: post #14

Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronaut rants do, perhaps unfairly in this case, immediately spring to my mind. Especially as Joel calls out Ray Ozzie by-name ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html Communications applications have to be extremely hard to pull off successfully, and God bless Ozzie for trying again. I'm tempted to spout off on how one would do this thing "right", but I think that would m…

But then again, this appears in the article you linked:

“Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.”

Re: Talko

#20

Post by tantalor »

natch wrote: post #17

It seems like a cheap shot, but it has to be said: I'm having trouble seeing what this provides that iMessage doesn't provide already: - Text, check. - Pictures and videos, check. - Group messaging, check. - Voice messaging, check. It sounds like they recreated the iMessage core features, other than the ability to fall back to SMS for text. I wonder about privacy protection. Maybe there are some other bells and whist…

> We're working on our Android and web apps.

iMessage doesn't have that.

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