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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

#121

Post by icebraining »

andrewvijay wrote: post #102

I got my first girl friend, mini project approval in college and many more from that gtalk. I was devastated to know it was discontinued. They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Which would have been a good effort. Companies work so hard to create brand value in their products but Google unintentionally creates value and destroys them later on. Phew.

They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it.

Then a lot of people would be claiming Google was being dishonest and tricking its users.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#122

Post by dba7dba »

nnain wrote: post #55
Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

This is cool. But IMHO the point of the article is about Google losing its first-mover advantage in chat apps due to wrong branding and prediction for GChat, not interoperability.

I force my friends to use Gchat when the chat is turning into long conversation and I want to type on my PC keyboard instead of my cell.

But I'm not sad Google missed out with Gchat. One less product Google dominates with means some other company can innovate in that area and compete.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#123

Post by inputmice »

Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations (https://Conversations.im) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#124

Post by icebraining »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #83

Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts. It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales t…

Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts.

What about Google Apps for Work? It's been around for a decade.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#125

Post by sametmax »

We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble, works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one: emails.

You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#126

Post by bad_user »

voltagex_ wrote: post #64
Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. I had the same problem when I started to use Signal. WhatsApp actually seems like the lesser of two evils right now - even though it's controlled by Facebook, they've added encryption and some of my friends are on it. Who'd have thought we'd look back on the days of MSN, AIM and ICQ as the golden age of interoperable messaging?…

Being able to use Gaim/Pidgin doesn't count as interoperability dude. Those protocols worked only because somebody bothered to reverse engineer them and this "interoperability" only worked half the time. I know because I was using Gaim/Pidgin for Yahoo! Messenger back then.

Today at least they are using web technologies and I get to use Facebook's Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts and Slack on Linux without headaches.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#128

Post by icebraining »

bpchaps wrote: post #33
csydas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think made it horrible? I think it had a simple UI, which for many things worked very well. When I managed the Technical Support for a university using Google Apps for Education, gchat's simple interface was kind of a blessing in that everyone on the campus had it, it was unobtrusive, automatically saved and searchable (though the search could have used some improvements), and you could make calls/video c…

Because this is how hangouts looks on a 4k monitor: https://imgur.com/lPkNnhR This is its default size and behavior when in a browser: https://imgur.com/bXL1Ezn This. Is. Horrible. I have some very, very unkind words for the person or team or manager who decided to make hangouts show as few lines as possible. It didn't used to be this way.

I just give the conversation its own browser window, then I resize at will. Sure the defaults could be better, but it makes more sense to use the window manager anyway.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#129

Post by gkop »

sametmax wrote: post #125

We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble, works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one: emails. You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.

Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#130

Post by chris_wot »

lqdc13 wrote: post #93
zanny wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only major problem I still have with Vector is that despite Matrix the protocol specifying ways to register and authenticate accounts using various web apis like oauth[1] Vector is always pushed as the premium Matrix webclient but it doesn't support anything but username / password. You would be amazed how many people simply refuse to create new username / password pairs in 2016. And its a good thing. We should b…

So what you're saying is that username/password is still the only choice for privacy minded people.

Google Talk did have XMPP functionality, which allowed for SASL. [1] But of course, they killed this off because they wanted to dominate chat and messaging with their own proprietary protocol.

If they had not followed this strategy they would be killing in this market, even whilst supporting XMPP Federation. But they have chosen to release multiple proprietary products, so they aren't the lead in the market. Silly of them really, and it just shows you they aren't really the nimble company they once were.

1. https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications

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