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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

danudey wrote: post #260
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.

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,…

That's a good point - especially important if someone's thinking about legislating a particular technology. On the other hand, maybe in this case it would be enough to legislate a requirement for openness of the protocol? I.e. whatever it is, if it has enough many users, it has to be fully available to third party integrations.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#272

Post by quickben »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #177
ungzd wrote: post #52

This blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more not mentioned here): - Google Talk - Hangouts Meet - Hangouts Chat - Android Messages (something new, never heard of it) (And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS). How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.

If you're a Project Fi user like myself, you have all access to all of these technologies. All you need to do is pressure your friends into joining Project Fi and they'll be able to chat with you too!

I don't know why, but I have this Deja Vu feeling...

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#273

Post by gtirloni »

At this point it would be better if they would just discontinue Talk, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, etc, etc, etc and focus on a single communications app. Give them a 6 month deadline and for the love of God, have a single app that I can use for chat, voice and video.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#274

Post by shmerl »

danudey wrote: post #268
shmerl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because being constrained by existing standards, rather than being free to make the changes to the protocol that you think will make the product better, is a huge trade-off. The benefit is that your users get that interoperability with e.g. MSN Messenger or Skype or whatever. However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications bu…

Someone has to start doing it, otherwise you'll get the catch 22. So "others aren't doing it" is not an excuse.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#275

Post by kristopolous »

james_pm wrote: post #43
startupdiscuss wrote: post #22

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".

In a den of lions when saying this, but companies that do that have too many engineers.

There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things.

This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better products; they use simpler paradigms and abstractions, have better combinable primitives, communicate purpose more effectively, and produce overall better tools.

The corollary is the stupid thing you can hack to do what you want is often better than the smart thing that is very carefully designed to do what you don't - because one of them you can technically use and the other you can't.

This is why earlier versions are frequently better than later ones and earlier products seem to do more, better, and faster. It's why smaller companies seem to produce better things, and counter-intuitively, products that take less time to finish (say a few days) seem to do better and gain more traction then the 6-month effort.

Some things really are profoundly complex, like databases and operating systems. Most things however, despite much we'd like to pretend, are not in that class of software.

And yes, these claims are cultural bomb-throwing. But the evidence for it is solid.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#276

Post by niftich »

ungzd wrote: post #52

This blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more not mentioned here): - Google Talk - Hangouts Meet - Hangouts Chat - Android Messages (something new, never heard of it) (And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS). How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.

Android Messages is apparently [1] the renamed "Messenger", the Google one (the internal android APK names are the same), which was probably confused with "Messenger" the Facebook one, likely to Google's detriment and Facebook's gain. Renaming it probably salvages some of that confusion.

Also, Hangouts "the original" (aka. the Hangouts App, Chrome Extension, Chrome App, Gmail Widget, and the standalone website) -- most of which will probably live on. The extra irony is that the same time Hangouts App users are being warned to move to a different app for mobile text messages, GTalk users are being told to switch to Hangouts, while Google Voice users are being assured that their Google Voice texts (and presumably calls) will keep working within the Hangouts App, even though a new Google Voice App was recently released that mysteriously added chat.

Then there's Allo, Duo...

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14721602/android-messages-...

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#277

Post by kakarot »

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…

The correct way to solve this problem is through raising awareness of privacy issues and supporting efforts to create competitive and attractive open source communication protocols, not legislation enforced by a prison/military industrial complex. What you're suggesting is to hand the State further control over our choice in communications platforms and trust them to never abuse it.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#278

Post by sah2ed »

thrill wrote: post #8
mindcrime wrote: post #2

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.

A googler already summarized their strategy succinctly up-thread [1] as:

Google is a feudally organized collection of fiefdoms and this shows in their product strategy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13951918

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#279

Post by dbg31415 »

I was terrified when I first read this, I thought it was "Google Voice" but then I realized it wasn't... and couldn't for the life of me picture what Google Talk was since... we have Google Hangouts and couldn't tell you the last time I even saw "Google Talk" anywhere.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#280

Post by quanticle »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #184
throwaway6556 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for this. I plan to roll my own email server in the near future, due to legal and privacy concerns. As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment because they're asking for data from a third party, and the Fourth Amendment only applies to self-incrimination.

As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment

Currently, as I understand they are not. But, there is legislation [1] which proposes extending Fourth Amendment protection to e-mails and communication stored on your behalf on third party servers. I've already written to my Congressperson in support of that bill.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/387/

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