Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#2I think gchat had a horrible ux.
Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#3ICQ actually predates AIM
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#4I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo.
I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously, it's also simultaneously terrifying.
Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#5I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.
The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.
It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#6We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji.
When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit.
I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#7I may be a resistant one, but I prefer and still use gtalk/gchat/hangouts over slack or any other tool. Slack requires either another tab, a new mobile app or a desktop app, which isn't that great when switching between organisations. At least on my Ubuntu Linux.
Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored.
If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple, that would be great IMHO.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#8ICQ actually predates AIM
It doesn't say it didn't (that I can see). I think it's saying AIM brought the concept into the mainstream, and I think that's probably more or less true in the US.
Interestingly (to me, at least), this seemed to be pretty reasonable. No one I knew in Canada had AIM, except if they talked to Americans regularly. MSNM was very very popular, though. And ICQ before it.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#9I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.
The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing .
> The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.
I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.
Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
#10We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to t…
My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.