261–270 of 504 posts
XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be supported starting June 26. Fuck you, Google. Just fuck you...
I wish someone at Google would explain their overarching strategy and target. This piecemeal approach just reeks of no coherent plan.
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…
I'd say google has entered into a post modern era of chat. I don't think there's anything they could announce that would actually mean something to the generally public, there's too many overlapping brands with overlapping functionality.
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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…
Oh, I agree. You're describing the effect of a corrupt government allowed to prevent or eliminate laws meant to protect its voters. I was talking about what law would be necessary if voters cared enough to push one.
I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user experience.
I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as a hub - every chat system logs their history for a given contact into their contacts app, so I can open up a contact and see every communication app (even multiplayer games) and an interlined history for them all? That would make this work.
I could take the SMS, the chat, voice, even the dialer off the home screen and just have contacts - even a shortcut to my wife, so I could just open a person and then open a communication app for that person. That would work.
But without that, having a zillion small communication apps does not provide a good experience because the android home screen is a bad shell for lots of small apps. It's just a launcher that's good for big monolithic ones.
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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".
The result of open-sourcing all data formats and protocols would obviously be all the data formats and protocols released as open-source. OOXML is not the only one in existence.
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Google Wave was supposed to replace email. But actually they replaced email with gmail. Now you can't send email from your own server because it will be blacklisted on gmail by default and noone on gmail will receive these emails. So you have to use "cloud email providers". On Android they changed "Email" client to "Gmail" client.
Stop spreading FUD. I've been running my own email server for a year without delivery issues to Gmail or Outlook/Office 365. Just make sure your VPS IP is not blacklisted, and play the DKIM/etc game. You'll be fine.
Random blacklisting maybe is less of an issue if you run your own server with a unique ip only you use, but for most people it's getting harder and harder not to use gmail/outlook/lycos.
So ya fuck spammers.
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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?
However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications but not sending them in return), then it turns out you're being constrained, and possibly doing additional work to add features, and the person benefitting the most is someone else's users and not your own.
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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 hea…
Discord's product isn't a hosting service, their product is the quality of the service as well. This quality would be impossible with XMPP as it exists today, within the constraints of a startup. Remember, they do voice and they want to do video as well. Google's own efforts on Jingle failed due to performance.
As for mobile, it's not just power consumption, it's connection lifecycle. XMPP last I heard had extremely poor support for lossy connectivity.
I'm really not being a troll here, I'm just confused: Google Talk : what is that? Is that the little box on the left hand side of the page on gmail that lets you chat with other gmail users? Google Hangouts : different? I know it's videochat but it also has text ... a different thing? The Android/Google phone chat app thingy --- is this different still? obviously I'm not a regular google user at least not of these se…
But then Google decided they didn't want Hangouts to be that anymore, and are stripping out features to focus it as the "corporate" messenger while they split its functionality into three different Android apps - Allo, Duo, and Messages.
So now Hangouts is just a desktop/mobile videochat and IM. No more SMS. And they have a "consumer-oriented" pair of voicechat and IM apps in Duo and Allo. But they're not compatible with Hangouts so if one user uses Hangouts and the other one uses Allo, they can't communicate directly.
Google has gone mad.