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Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

mwmeyer.com

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Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#31

Post by anon4 »

userbinator wrote: post #5

It's odd that, despite there being an open protocol for realtime chat that is over 25 years old, older than HTTP or HTML, I would guess that the majority of the population hasn't heard of or used it. On the other hand, almost everyone has heard of and uses email, which also dates from around the same time period. > A unified communication service would not only allow me to communicate easily on any device it makes se…

I'd say because they're hard (or at least tricky and not trivial) to implement and rely on more infrastructure than a lean startup wants to maintain and once you do, you again have a separate service that doesn't interoperate with anybody, but now your technology stack is an order of magnitude larger than the competition's and therefore more prone to breakage.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#32

Post by m_mueller »

gcb0 wrote: post #27
m_mueller wrote: post #22

We need a multi step process to get out of this whole communications calamity: 0) Acknowledge there is a problem. 1) Have a client/service based on open standards and frictionless end-to-end encryption for ALL major OSes (Mobile + Desktop). 2) Get people to use it by building a lucrative business model around it (without giving up openness) and throw money into advertising. 3)-5) Repeat for Voice. 6)-8) Repeat for Vi…

> Most promising at Never heard..

My foreign language skills tend to increase between the second and third coffee, sorry about that..

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#33

Post by anonymoushn »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #17
pzxc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on my own what I might have done to get my account disabled. The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (…

One possibility is that you and your coworkers are creating multiple google accounts which are being used from the same IP (your work's IP) simultaneously, and since there isn't any history (like email, search, etc) on those accounts then you're setting off Google's spam detector. Not a good situation. I agree that it sucks. But... well, honestly and unfortunately, your best bet is to write a blog post about the inju…

This is a good idea. As far as I know, HN is Google's primary support channel. I am looking forward to the post.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#34

Post by sgift »

United857 wrote: post #11

Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could only email, message and communicate members within each service. Back to the future...

IRC. Solving problems we shouldn't have in the first place since the dawn of the Internet.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#35

Post by philtar »

darklajid wrote: post #30

Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious. WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are mov…

There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant.

Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#37

Post by darklajid »

philtar wrote: post #35
darklajid wrote: post #30

Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious. WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are mov…

There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant. Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.

My mail clients have push support.

Look, I'm not saying 'Use mail for IM' nor do I claim that this is ideal. I'm saying that this is what I resort to because that's the _only_ thing that works.

In my world, there _is_ no IM solution. I don't have the necessary clients - or my friends don't. Or a subset of the people I want to reach are on a different service (Friend A & B on Hangout, C is using WA or Threema). The IM you talk about? It doesn't exist in my world and only therefor mail qualifies as 'as good as possible, given the environment'.

And .. if that makes 'IM' less like (each * a new message)

* Hi.

* You there?

* What are you doing?

* What about a beer tonight?

and leads to

"Hey, want to have a beer tonight?"

(still 'instant', as in 'reaches me in seconds and reply might! be equally fast) - all the better.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#38

Post by 72deluxe »

darklajid wrote: post #23
Semaphor wrote: post #13

It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.

GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle. Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my r…

My brother and I have avoided upgrading the Talk application on our mobiles and we can video call each other from it. I can call him from my Xoom too, which I also have upgraded to the latest Hangouts.

If I attempt to video call from a laptop to my brother (using the plugin you must install in Chrome etc.), he never gets notified and it states that he can't join the Hangout.

This makes the service useless.

Why is this broken? How do I fix it? Is there anyone here from Google that can help?

I remember using MSN in the olden days on a variety of platforms with joy and ease, yet as everyone states, all these new tiny platforms that compete makes it actually impossible to reliably send messages to anyone. I still use SMS for that.

Also, does anyone know if Hangouts on Android indicates if someone is online or offline yet?

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#39

Post by daveid »

darklajid wrote: post #23
Semaphor wrote: post #13

It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.

GTalk and xmpp? That's brittle. Source: I've recently fired up my own xmpp server. All of my friends that are on Hangout (either because of the automated update on their mobile, or due to the aggressive 'It is so much better, really' marketing and the G+ bull, or due to new mobiles, coming with the full G+ package out of the box) won't be able to talk to me. They don't even see messages when I try to add them to my r…

I talk to friends who are still on Google's XMPP servers from Fastmail's XMPP server. It works. I think it works if their account was created when gTalk was still a thing. But yeah, I'm more worried about Google shutting off my friends every day.

Re: Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app

#40

Post by joosters »

anonymoushn wrote: post #6
voltagex_ wrote: post #2

>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication. Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems worse now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revisi…

It is worse. If you try to run an online IM aggregator like the Meebo of old, Microsoft (Skype) will block your IPs and Blizzard (BNet chat) or Facebook (WhatsApp) will sue you off the face of the earth. What's more, many services in this category have recently gone from trying to make the world better to trying to make it worse. eBuddy and imo.im shut down their IM aggregators entirely to build their own private IM…

Do you know why imo dropped their interopability? Were they pushed or did they really believe that they could strike out on their own?
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