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Talko

talko.com

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Re: Talko

#21

Post by tantalor »

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…

Voice is much more clear because it conveys nuance, such as sarcasm, which text cannot. I bet speaking is much faster than typing for most people, although reading is faster than listening. Voice (sound) is analog, not digital!

Converting voice to text solves a lot of these problems, but this app doesn't do that.

Re: Talko

#22

Post by frankus »

I remember thinking it was pretty revolutionary when I got a demo back in early 2013 (had an interview there, but got a too-good-to-refuse offer elsewhere).

Granted, that was before FaceTime audio and the audio features of iMessage, but at the time I was basically ready to bury everything on my iPhone's dock and replace it with this as soon as it launched.

It has a ton of really slick touches that I think make it a really compelling app, well beyond the sum of it's core features.

Re: Talko

#23

Post by tantalor »

noblethrasher wrote: post #19
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.”

It's not. Collaborative editing is.

People were using file syncing for asynchronous collaborative editing. File syncing is not such a big deal now that we have synchronous collaborative editors.

Re: Talko

#24

Post by akira2501 »

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…

WhatsApp is highly price-competitive with the native offerings, particularly in the markets where it is most popular. It also benefits from wide cross platform and cross network availability.

While the UI for Talko might be slick, there are already very similar and competitive offerings to Talko that operate on multiple platforms (e.g. Voxer) that have failed to take any market share the way Talko apparently hopes to.

If they're going to be successful, it will boil down to marketing more than anything.

Re: Talko

#25

Post by marcusf »

tantalor wrote: post #23
noblethrasher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

It's not. Collaborative editing is. People were using file syncing for asynchronous collaborative editing. File syncing is not such a big deal now that we have synchronous collaborative editors.

Dropbox?

Re: Talko

#28

Post by davedx »

hawkice wrote: post #8
jsmeaton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa whoa whoa. FULL duplex?!

That's what I'm imagining. I know the engineers figured out a way to get it to work walky-talky style where you can either speak or listen (but not both) two-way -- let's call that partial duplex -- but I think the new wave of innovating social mobile apps could really utilize the flat network design paradigm in this new way, creating a whole new way to communicate with friends that also opens doors for enterprise us…

They should totally build it in Clojure and Erlang!

Re: Talko

#29

Post by woah »

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.

Hardy har har

Re: Talko

#30

Post by Renaud »

programmer_dude wrote: post #27

>The software visionary who created Lotus Notes Stopped reading after this.

Lotus Notes was revolutionary and visionary when it came out, in 1989.

That it failed to really adapt to a changing technological landscape and failed to meet user expectations is more an indictment of the management at Lotus/IBM than an indictment of the initial creator.

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