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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#251

Post by X86BSD »

I have come to loathe Google. Android is a tire fire mess. It's UI is horrible. And as bad as that is I have google fiber tv and that UI is even worse. Google does NOT get UI.

Everything short of gmail that they have tried to make work has failed. They don't innovate. They create short lived products that bring in no extra ad revenue. Google is ripe for being replaced. It's big but so was MS. You may love Google to death. I think they are a company with no vision, no innovation, and are milking the ad revenue teet. Someone is going to replace them.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#252

Post by shmerl »

sneak wrote: post #243
shmerl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firstly not nobody. Secondly, how can you grow it if instead of moving it forward, they roll it back? That's the opposite of progress.

> Ultimately most users just don't care about federation. Them's the facts.

Not really. Everyone is annoyed by this issue. But there isn't much they can do. People need to register on N different services and use N different clients to communicate with users of those networks when they need to. Do you think they appreciate this mess or find it highly convenient? But they don't have any other option (except may be not communicating with some of them at all).

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#253

Post by jpttsn »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #123
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…

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…

World you be happy to put the offenders in prison? Or if they didn't pay fines, to show up and collect?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#254

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

jkarneges wrote: post #40
rsoto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not really into chat protocols, but what does XMPP federation mean? For what I understand I will be able to login via Pidgin into my Gmail account, but not from a custom domain, am I right? Either way, GTalk was such a clean, centered and small IM experiencie +10 years ago, Hangouts is just a mess.

Federation is where different service providers can communicate with each other, like how email works. Meaning, you could login to Gmail (whether gmail.com or custom domain) and send messages to users with accounts on non-Gmail IM providers (practically speaking this meant hobbyist, corporate, or university IM server deployments; Google was the only major consumer IM provider to adopt a federated protocol). The shutd…

I believe that at one point a Google chat user could talk with a facebook chat user.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#255

Post by remir »

cptskippy wrote: post #195
TorKlingberg wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"online" as a concept has become a bit meaningless with mobile clients.

This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way. People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with pe…

You are allowed down time. If people don't respect/understand that, it's their problem, no yours.

I don't answer the phone when I eat or after 10pm. Same thing with text messages/emails. "Do not disturb" mode is there for a reason.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#256

Post by WorldMaker »

mindcrime wrote: post #148
scrollaway wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done. I want to highlight that this is not realistically possible for anyone, not right now anyway. When Discord was created, XMPP was the only option if you wanted to adopt an open standard, and it was absolutely not up to the task . Matrix was also an option but far too new. Discord is a startup, and is run as a business (just lik…

and it was absolutely not up to the task. In what way? The chief complaint I've heard about XMPP over the last couple of years is about excessive power consumption on mobile. And my own experience is that those concerns are highly over-stated.

My anecdotal experience is also that all the purpose built closed protocols like Facebook Messenger and Slack both seem to use way more power consumption "in idle" (no message traffic) than I recall ever dealing with for an XMPP client...

I've never seen users actually complain directly about an app's "excessive power consumption". Can we all admit that one has always been an excuse?

The only other complaint I've heard about XMPP was that it was too extensible. There wasn't enough mandatory features in the base protocol to expect good clients for fancy things and there were too many extensions to need to follow to write a good client if you tried to track "fancy thing du jour"... which is as much a feature as a bug (and the whole reason for that X in XMPP).

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#257

Post by roylez »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #227
shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.

China has effectively mandated IPv6, and IPv6 certainly is popular in China (I think all mobile phones in PRC use IPv6, I may be wrong) - but let's not forget that China is promoting IPv6 because APNIC's allocated IPv4 space for China was comically undersized.

Nope. If mobile network uses ipv6 then people would have no problem accessing Facebook

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#258

Post by roylez »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #227
shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.

China has effectively mandated IPv6, and IPv6 certainly is popular in China (I think all mobile phones in PRC use IPv6, I may be wrong) - but let's not forget that China is promoting IPv6 because APNIC's allocated IPv4 space for China was comically undersized.

Nope. If mobile network uses ipv6 then people would have no problem accessing Facebook

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#259

Post by icebraining »

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.

And the result is OOXML, which is well known for being a trainwreck and which nobody - including Microsoft - has been able to implement properly, despite being an "open standard".

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#260

Post by danudey »

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.

Korea mandated through legislation that all online shopping had to go through ActiveX controls, because that was the only way to guarantee secure encryption at the time. Now it's practically the least secure way to online shop and even Microsoft recommends not using ActiveX, but it's a huge amount of work to strip that infrastructure out and make everything work 'properly' so it's still an issue even today.

In short, legislating a solution is a workaround that can turn out to be a huge detriment not too long down the road. I'm no libertarian, but it seems like a bad idea to me.

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