Talko • Hacker News Board

Re: Talko

#41

Post by rattray » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 8:14 AM UTC

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.

I'm not a mod, but I believe downvotes should be used for comments which are not constructive or appropriate, rather than comments one disagrees with.

Re: Talko

#42

Post by hrktb » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

I found this landing page extremely diluted from a information point of view.

From the first block:

Amazing things can happen when we talk with each other. Thoughts are shared, ideas formed and problems solved. Talko is the best way to use your voice to get things done.

The first sentence doesn't bring me any information, it's just a bland statement. The second is an expansion of the first. The third says this Talko thing is a way to do things with your voice.

I felt like loo¥sing my time reading nonsense, when I could be learning about a new app and see demos of cool features.

Re: Talko

#43

Post by g_h » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 8:42 AM UTC

artbikes wrote: post #5

Talkomatic was the world's first multi-user chat application. It was hosted on the PLATO system where Ray Ozzie once worked. There is a online version created by the original authors at: http://talko.cc/

I was curious about the timeline of chat applications and googled it. EMISARI pre-dated Talkomatic by a couple years: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm

Re: Talko

#44

Post by blackstrype » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 8:58 AM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #24

swartkrans wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, powerful marketing will make the difference -- seeing as Voxer is essentially the same product.

Re: Talko

#45

Post by blackstrype » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 8:59 AM UTC

hawkice wrote: post #4

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.

Killer feature request: a dual-streaming mode where I can talk and hear a friend talk at the same time. The future is gonna be AWESOME.

"The Voxer application, for example, is capable of supporting full-duplex communication, allowing two (or more) participants of a conversation to engage in near real-time communication, similar to a synchronous telephone call. Participants are therefore required to select the PTT feature for the entire duration of the full-duplex exchange, which may be inconvenient after a certain period of time."

http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982

Re: Talko

#46

Post by seivan » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 9:37 AM UTC

Spearchucker wrote: post #35

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…

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. I…

Continuity on iOS 8 / Yosemite will solve some of those issues. But that's if you're in the ecosystem.

Play a movie on your laptop, resume on your device when you leave (given there is an app for it)

Re: Talko

#47

Post by hrvbr » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 10:10 AM UTC

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…

There's also no good search engine for audio messages. This may be a big deal for businesses, when compared with email.

Re: Talko

#48

Post by lvturner » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 10:16 AM UTC

Haven't yet played with this, but every time there is talk of a new messenger, no one ever mentions WeChat, I guess it's just not that popular out of mainland China, but it blows whatsapp out of the water. If even for the very simple fact that I don't have to hit "Send" I just hit "Enter/Done" on the keyboard, more phone-based messaging apps should do this imo

Re: Talko

#49

Post by buro9 » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 10:31 AM UTC

This looks like a reinvention of, and blurring of the lines between, voicemail and the phone call.

And actually, I like the idea.

Sometimes I find email and SMS a chore, but would love to leave my partner a 5 second "Hey I'm picking up milk, do you need anything else?" message that was auto-transcribed, and if I were on the tube (unavailable) she could leave a message for me "Yeah, some of those star-shaped veg, you know the ones next to the beans down the end of the second aisle".

She'd never have typed that into an SMS, and I probably would've just winged trying to think if there was anything she needed.

Metropolis transportation and living makes communication broken and fractured. Real-time mobile communication works only when both people are online... so a near real-time thing that overcomes the flaws of mobile coverage in cityscapes and their transport (cycling, underground metro systems, etc) and still retain a personal touch would be great.

Re: Talko

#50

Post by EdSharkey » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 12:42 PM UTC

Spearchucker wrote: post #35

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…

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. I…

Well, I think Architecture Astronauts are generally a huge nuisance because they can sell work so well. Yet they so often simultaneously produce these unworkable, purely conjectural designs that so often do not connect with real users and their needs/wants. And how many times have I heard "all the knowledge about the system is locked up in his head"? Tough to keep the bile down sometimes.

Heck, I'm up and working at 4am today because of an AA and his stupid "elegant" data design that is "set in stone" that requires me to provide reams of documentation. I have to make up for the fact that my data is wholly incomprehensible without all kinds of independent documentation. This is all work the AA should have done himself, but instead all he shares are these idyllic, sophomoric examples that NEVER appear in the real world.

It's rich that the system is thought to be "elegant" because one major aspect is simple (there are only something like 8 fundamental data types in the file format to describe the whole system). Elegant? No, perhaps "convoluted" describes it better, maybe "rambling". Data files tend to be veeeery tall and veeeery skinny. Sigh.

So I'm working up to a huge real-world demo and I'm looking forward to canvasing the team in order to create a crisis. "Looking at this realistic example and seeing how much work it took me to get here, what are your impressions of the file format?"