101–110 of 382 posts
There are several contributing factors to Google's disastrous history with messaging services, but a significant cause is Google being spooked by Facebook. In an earlier post of mine [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular miss…
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The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good. The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have wa…
Zoom is less shit than the others but still fairly awful. Slack, imo, solved instant messaging in businesses completely, but conferencing is still a wild west of garbage solutions.
It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finall…
It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.
On Linux it does not even show the screen shared by others (Windows) users. In the old Skype (not for Business) client Linux users could even share. For corporations progress means removing working functionality.
That's alright, the competitors are even worse. I used to use Skype on Linux. They stopped development on the Linux client a decade ago, but it kept working just fine. And then they released a new client and forced everyone to upgrade. The new client is so bad in terms of sound quality that I've been forced to switch to Hangouts.
You might be able to use Slack or Discord, though I don't believe either offer video options and the only real mention of voice that I saw for Slack was for calls. Still, Discord might actually be worth looking at - it's targeted at gamers, but it does at least small-group voice chat reasonably well in my experience.
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It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.
What the hell is going on with groupware? IBM, MS, Google, are they all just befuddled by whatever web fad is current to forget making their stuff actually useful? I feel like there has been nothing but regression since 10 years, ever since Skype brought free and stable group calls.
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Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web,…
Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint. They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer en…
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> Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.
it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS
I'm not a big fan of Hangouts, but if it stopped someone from pestering strangers online? Good on it.
Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond. And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence…
Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".