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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

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Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#191

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
CydeWeys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there. ...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

Yes, it was really good. It pretty much Just Worked(tm), had a good UI for a web app, and was relatively lightweight (I remember using it even at crappy airport computers).

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#192

Post by Joeri »

freeflight wrote: post #89
craftyguy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.

Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.

ICQ’s find a friend feature got me into contact with someone in south africa (I’m from europe), who I ended up visiting for a month.

It’s the sort of random encounter / friendship that you could have in the pre-2005 internet and that’s much harder today.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#193

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

thinkloop wrote: post #100
freeflight wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.

I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?

I think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001.

Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#194

Post by Macha »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
CydeWeys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there. ...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

For a while, imo was meebo's successor, but they saw the writing on the wall for third party interoperability after Skype cut them off for the nth time and decided to focus on their own walled garden chat and Twitter service instead :(

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#195

Post by entropie »

b1daly wrote: post #22

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…

> The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.

You also cannot manage contacts in any app on android besides the contacts app, or, probably better for you: http://contacts.google.com

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#196

Post by jackson1way »

whateveruser wrote: post #160
luka-birsa wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its…

Perhaps try Skype lite? It has almost zero bloat, and has been working flawlessly for all my needs.

"Introducing Skype Lite Built for India - Chat and share with friends."

it appears to exist only for Android phones.

It's nothing but a joke that you'd have to switch to a "lite" version that is built explicitly for India [because of bad infrastructure] just to make it work in a country with much better infrastructure.

It's like buying a low-end car built for Indian market, because your regular car doesn't fit on the narrow roads in the US, the fuel consumption is too high, it leaks oil constantly and there is no service because nobody cares.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#197

Post by tobias3 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #191
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there. ...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

Yes, it was really good. It pretty much Just Worked(tm), had a good UI for a web app, and was relatively lightweight (I remember using it even at crappy airport computers).

It used libpurple to connect to the chat networks -- same as Pidgin :)

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#198

Post by jackson1way »

_kwmj wrote: post #175
signal11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.

I have the same issue with the web app (using an iPhone). What I figured out is, that you don't need to unlock the screen to make the web app reconnect. All you need to do is switch on the phone (without unlocking), so just give the home button a little tap and 2-3s later the web app is reconnected. Not a great solution, but well...

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#199

Post by iforgotpassword »

I can only agree with that post. Sometimes I'm wondering though if this is just us techsavy people or the fact that I'm getting old and everything was better in the old days. Maybe the average person not working in tech prefers how this works today? Many times I'm already lost at the basic presentation of modern websites or apps. Big colorful landing pages that try to aggregate different data and events in an intelligent way but just seem like a jumbled mess to me, everything has to be dynamic and load additional data via ajax so that often times the back button doesn't work or at least makes sure the scroll position won't be restored properly... I could go on for hours. I guess I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#200

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #78
oldcynic wrote: post #21

Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk. Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now st…

That's been my experience as well. Facebook/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Allo/whatever might have amazing features but I truly don't care. SMS/iMessage (since it's seamlessly integrated) has completely taken over with my group of friends because of one defining feature - everyone has it. If you have a phone number, you can receive a text from me. A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group threa…

I suppose you live in a country where the telcos offer free SMS. In Spain they cost money, so almost no one uses SMS for personal messaging. All the SMSs I get are from companies.
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