201–210 of 504 posts
Aka their best chat client. Instead of having one great chat platform they now have several not so great clients.
Allo, Duo, Android Messages, Hangouts, Gtalk. Oh you have 3 Gmail's because you've been an Android YouTube and Google Apps user since 2010? Good luck with that nightmare, we'll get all your personal and business contacts all jumbled together!
It was full of spam.
At this point I have no idea which Google chat client is which. A few years ago I remember having Google Talk on my android phone. Then after some random update the application disappeared from my phone and was replaced with hangouts. Now is Google Talk the same as GChat? Was Hangouts anything more than just a new branding for Google Talk? I have no idea. And what's up with this Google Allo thing? Again, it seems lik…
Google Talk is the original XMPP based chat system and was known informally as Gchat or Gtalk. There were web and desktop clients. Hangouts is the "new" proprietary messaging system from 2013. Google Talk and Hangouts are integrated at least for text messages but Hangouts adds lots of features like group video chat. Google Talk provides XMPP protocol access for federation and third-party clients.
Hangouts app on Android could do Hangouts, local SMS, and Google Voice SMS.
I find it interesting that there is less confusion about Apple Messages even though it was renamed from iChat to iMessages to Messages. The app also supports both SMS and iMessage protocol. In addition, iChat supported XMPP and third party clients until was shut down.
Here's what I don't get about Google. A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead. Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and light…
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I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it. IM has become a fundamental communication mechanism. Imagine how held back society would be if we had 50 different voice standards rather than the singular phone system we have now. IM needs to be forcefully standardized.
Don't we already have GSM and LTE, and who knows what else? And I'm not aware of any legislation for the use of those over others. As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.
Here's what I don't get about Google. A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead. Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and light…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps this is the point we need legislation to require that IM services with above X users in the relevant jurisdiction must provide a full, open, protocol and enable interoperation via the published protocol? That's the only way I see the companies involved would move to enable cross-platform communications? Aside: >It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. I have a shared account on a small ISP, Mic…
I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it. IM has become a fundamental communication mechanism. Imagine how held back society would be if we had 50 different voice standards rather than the singular phone system we have now. IM needs to be forcefully standardized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Managing your own server is in general pretty hard (for sending or receiving). Unless you want to invest a lot of time in security and so on. It's simply way overwhelming. And if you don't invest in security, you are inviting trouble.
Sure. I've been running my own mail server for almost 20 years, but you seemed to imply that the bare act of sending email from a personal server to Gmail was a bad idea for some reason.
I just had an image of myself posting the headline: "Google discontinues Gmail and Search" as a way to kickstart a conversation about our reliance on services, and whether we can blame companies for not subsidizing services we like and so on. But then I realized it would just go sideways into a discussion about click bait and appropriate headlines, so I am posting it as a comment.
The Gmail part would go something like: Google discontinues Gmail and Google Inbox is the replacement! Then a year later, Google intros Mail from Google, a new webmail client that is like Inbox, but has more of the classic email interface UX that users expect. A year later, they announce Inbox is going away and everyone should move to Mail from Google, which they have rebranded "Gmail".
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Not just failed. Google betrayed XMPP. You can blame Eric Schmidt for it. He gave some lame speech about how other instant messaging services aren't playing fair, so Google should also become a walled garden. And that was it. They made Hangouts and stopped caring about federated IM idea. It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatib…
Perhaps this is the point we need legislation to require that IM services with above X users in the relevant jurisdiction must provide a full, open, protocol and enable interoperation via the published protocol? That's the only way I see the companies involved would move to enable cross-platform communications? Aside: >It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. I have a shared account on a small ISP, Mic…
Even if we assume they are American companies, and we can sue them if they violate the rule; how on EARTH would we define an IM protocol broadly enough to avoid an easy avoidance of the law, but narrowly enough to not basically block all proprietary protocols?