I don't have an iPhone so I can't install it but it could be a case of bad communication. At least the product page doesn't explain what problem it is trying to solve or what the difference is between this an hangout or whatsapp. So it just looks like just another app. And maybe it is
Talko
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Talko
#32There may be many apps, solving different parts of this problem, but putting all these different parts under one roof can sometimes make a difference. That's what they are doing.
Re: Talko
#33The tech and UX side of this app are both quite interesting, but the real story will be in their user acquisition. Getting people, particularly people under 35, to use a new communications app is really hard because they have to persuade people in their networks to use it too, otherwise it offers no value. Skype did it by being really easy video conferencing, WhatsApp did it by being a free alternative to SMS, Snapchat did it by automatically deleting sexts. On the face of it, Talko offers nothing that people don't already have, so it'll be interesting to see how and where they push it.
Re: Talko
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
The idea you'd know we're building it, and how? Absurd! Let's follow the example of the founder in question -- STEALTH it.
Come on, that's how to have SUPER ADVANCED technology.
Re: Talko
#35Joel 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…
I've no problem being called an astronaut, even if I'm not working on this problem. Sync sucks. With all these services like Dropbox, OneDrive and so on I still have to manage sync myself. I still don't trust the security (this is huge). I still can't resume a song or movie on my phone where I left off on my PC. My bookmarks don't sync between Firefox and IE.
If I had the resources this is something I'd try to fix. It's 2014 for crying out loud. Live Mesh got me excited at the time, but it just never went as far as it needed to.
Re: Talko
#36Earlier 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.
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Re: Talko
#37Awesome, 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.
Can we add some way to send short text messages too?
Yeah, Ok, if we must.
I'll chuck it in as an appendix to the spec. Not that anyone will ever use it! I'll have to limit it to 160 characters though because I've only got 140 bytes to play with.
It's not like you can write anything meaningful with 160 chars anyway! When the hardware gets better we'll write a proper text messaging implementation. Lol!
Re: Talko
#38Earlier 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.
Microsoft OneNote
Re: Talko
#39Joel 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.”
Thanks for pointing that out! And when this was written, Dropbox had been in operations for 11 months...
Joel assumes the reason why synchronization apps didn't succeed was because there was no market, whereas the success of Dropbox proved the market was there alright, it just waited for the right app at the right time.
I've needed file synchronization for my whole professional life, which started in 1991. At first there was no Internet; then there was Internet but you couldn't connect to it at work (imagine that!) and the rate at home was so slow it wouldn't have made any sense to try to exchange files over the network (even when most Excel files weighted 20k).
I used floppies, and Zip discs (remember those?) and removable hard drives, with bizarre synchronization and copying applications that never worked properly and with which you could very easily erase your own files if used in the wrong way.
The day I found Dropbox was like the Second Coming. It was the day I stopped worrying.
I very much disagree with Joel about architecture astronauts; contrary to what we hear sometimes, being early is not the same as being wrong.
> The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things
I would trade a million Twitters for one Dropbox, and I bet I'm not alone. Dropbox we need; Twitter? not so much.
Re: Talko
#40I'm not too thrilled with the idea of a phone that automatically records and archives my voice conversations. When I call someone, I prefer to not have the stress of being careful of every word I say, lest someone try to make something of every inane comment I make, and I make a lot of them.