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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#241

Post by pokemongoaway »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
scrollaway wrote: post #27

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…

Everything has consolidated, so it's all about walling off users to increase friction between the Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple universes.

Yep, and I wish a bunch of HNers with lots of time would spin up an OSS Google Apps (for most of the apps at least) replacement. Then people could do one-click installs on AWS or their own infrastructure, and the like...

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#242

Post by cpncrunch »

furyg3 wrote: post #172
eachro wrote: post #60

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…

Seriously. I somehow ended up using all of them, and I honestly don't know what's going on anymore. I thought my Talk got merged into Hangouts, if I start a chat in Gmail it's sometimes findable in my iOS hangouts app, and sometimes it's not. A while ago the Voice team asked me to merge Voice with Hangouts, which I did because clearly the service was dead. This seemed like a plan... your SMS chats are just chats in H…

I just use hangouts on all platforms, and it seems to work well. Although I did have to install "hangouts dialer" on android to make phones calls from Hangouts. Not sure if that's still required.

Google: please just leave hangouts alone!

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#243

Post by sneak »

shmerl wrote: post #190
GauntletWizard wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a product driven decision. The number of active federations was absolutely tiny and the number of messages sent over those links even tinier. The amount of XMPP spam was catastrophic, and for most users the only knowledge they'd ever have of XMPP was when they got a friend request from buy.herbal.viagra@cheap-online-meds.com. XMPP federation was a great idea, but it never had adoption, and at some point Google…

Product driven or not, that decision was backward, not forward directed. And as I said, if they thought XMPP was deficient and couldn't address spam or what not, where is their better federated and open alternative? They never made one.

Why spend time building a federated system when nobody was using the last federated system?

Ultimately most users just don't care about federation. Them's the facts. That's why everyone takes PayPal and only nerds use bitcoin.

Slack vs IRC, too. Twitter vs GNU Social. I'm sure there are more.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#244

Post by pokemongoaway »

eachro wrote: post #60

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…

Yep, and I wish a bunch of HNers with lots of time would spin up an OSS Google Apps (for most of the apps at least) replacement. Then people could do one-click installs on AWS or their own infrastructure, and the like... (Yes, I know Zoho exists, but it isn't a close enough fit imo)

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#245

Post by shmerl »

kyrra wrote: post #229
shmerl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why Google felt betrayed by Microsoft: Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie... Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).

Larry Page says there he would like to see more open standards used, and he is sad the industry isn't moving in that direction. So why isn't any of their new IM technology an open standard?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#246

Post by PeterisP »

shmerl wrote: post #190
GauntletWizard wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a product driven decision. The number of active federations was absolutely tiny and the number of messages sent over those links even tinier. The amount of XMPP spam was catastrophic, and for most users the only knowledge they'd ever have of XMPP was when they got a friend request from buy.herbal.viagra@cheap-online-meds.com. XMPP federation was a great idea, but it never had adoption, and at some point Google…

Product driven or not, that decision was backward, not forward directed. And as I said, if they thought XMPP was deficient and couldn't address spam or what not, where is their better federated and open alternative? They never made one.

If you notice serious problems with federated messaging, it's an entirely valid choice to abandon federation instead of trying to make federation work. There's no evidence that a system that's (a) federated, (b) open to everyone and (c) non-spammy is possible in the first place; maybe it is, but even more likely you have to choose two out of three at best.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#247

Post by Danihan »

pgrote wrote: post #13
zekevermillion wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, Google owes me $50 for my obihai router I bought solely for free google integration. This is the problem with building anything on top of Gsuite -- they will screw you over at a random moment and deprecate whatever service you may have been relying on.

I think it'll still work, right? Google Voice is still supported.

Don't give them any ideas..

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#248

Post by shmerl »

cortesoft wrote: post #217
shmerl wrote: post #87

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.

On the list of computing tasks I do every day, running my email server is WAY down there on the list of difficulty. Email servers are probably even easier than web servers.

Which doesn't necessarily mean you take necessary steps to seriously protect it. Or may be it means you are an expert and all that is trivial for you. But in general it's clearly not.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#249

Post by fnord123 »

colordrops wrote: post #146
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #123

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.

I don't think it needs legislation as such but could be worked from a licensing point of view.

Everyone moans about AGPL. Fine. Make something better that says if you're going to interoperate with a service, you better damn well actually interoperate. Make the license viral like GPL and hopefully when we all push in that direction, everyone needs to join up.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#250

Post by joshuata »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #215
colordrops wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keep it simple. All protocols for communication and data formats for storage must be published as open source or public domain. This is to prevent or reduce lockin, walled gardens, etc. No other change. They can still compete in numerous other ways.

Although this is an appealing idea, I don't think it is realistic. Lobbying would destroy any legislation almost immediately, and there would still be the issue of competing standards.

I think a more achievable version would be that any online service which maintains user data must provide a method for a user to retrieve that data in an open-source format. Some companies would deliberately obfuscate formats, such as calendar appointments as JSON rather than iCAL or another existing standard, but I think it would give users more control than they currently have.

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