241–250 of 382 posts
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A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties. Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.
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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,…
I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.
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A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
You do need one to set it up, right? I had to scan a QR code displayed on my desktop with my phone. (I could continue to use the desktop app while my phone was being repaired, though, which was great.)
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Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.
A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
No smartphone is required for JMP, only an XMPP client (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 for some client options).
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Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se
Yes, what I meant to say is that the SIM card is tied to exactly one telco at any particular time. It's also tied to one device at a time. Perhaps one of the virtual SIM card offerings would work with Signal though. I'm juggling too many SIM cards and phones already. I don't want any new dependencies that complicate matters further.
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I'm using Signal on my linux desktop right now. It appears to be a packaged webpage but it works fine and is linked to my phone and laptop. All it require is a phone number, besides it's Snowden approved :)
They lose all credibility when they force you to reveal your phone number. Doesn't matter who endorses it.
Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity.
There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many irritating bugs that never get fixed. I'm close to canceling my subscription.
I'd be pretty hesitant about committing all in to any of Google's enterprise offerings, like GCE, based on my experience with their other products.
Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed…
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 may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers. As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare. After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly…
Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed…
I am a Firefox user and when I "need" to use hangout I just fire up Vivaldi.