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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#301

Post by djsumdog »

shmerl wrote: post #35
scrollaway wrote: post #27

Here's what I don't get about Google. A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead. Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and light…

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…

They gave up on Federated XMPP and never implemented video using XMPP. If they hated it so much, they could have proposed open changes. Now we're in a terrible IM landscape. No federation at all. E-mail is federated, but is been rendered terribly unreliable simply due to spam filters.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#302

Post by djsumdog »

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…

I run my own e-mail server too and constantly run into issues:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

If I send a new person an e-mail, I have to contact them on Facebook and tell them to check their spam folder. Fuck Google and Microsoft and their terrible e-mail filtering. Just because people are so dumb they will open any ransomware sent to them doesn't mean you drop all e-mail you don't trust with no way to account for it.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#303

Post by catdog »

ungzd wrote: post #58
scrollaway wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ever there was a software example of killing the goose with the golden eggs. Imagine if they thought like that about email?

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.

> Google Wave was supposed to replace email.

At least Wave was an open protocol including federation, even based on XMPP in fact. It maybe was the last thing before Google transitioned into a mostly walled garden.

> 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.

I run a small mail server for some years now, no issues sending to gmail.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#304

Post by vocatus_gate »

bigkm wrote: post #107
zokier wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw shit on the wall and see what sticks? Isn't that what pretty much everyone is doing?

Once it sticks and everyone is using it, then shut it down

It's sad but true. I can hardly trust any Google products any more because you never know when they're randomly going to give it the axe for no apparent reason.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#306

Post by sbd01 »

plg wrote: post #122

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…

A few years ago, Google integrated a messaging service called Google Talk into Gmail. It was "the little box on the left hand side", as well as a mobile app.

A few years later, Google rebranded Talk as Hangouts with a few new features, but for some inane reason left Talk available as a hidden option for those who wanted to use it over Hangouts.

Then, just because they felt like it, Google decided to integrate Google Voice, an online phone and text service, into Google Hangouts. This allowed you to make calls or send texts from the Hangouts app to regular phone numbers. To make matters even more confusing, Hangouts also served as an SMS app preinstalled on Nexus phones, which allowed this one app to send texts using Hangouts, Google Voice, or SMS.

Because Google has an unhealthily short attention span, they then decided to create an SMS-only app, which was intended to replace the SMS functionality of the Hangouts app. It seems that Google forgot they still had SMS functionality within the Hangouts​ app until now, and are finally removing it.

One would hope that was the end of it, but Google just couldn't make up its mind and released two new messaging and video calling apps, Allo and Duo respectively. Nobody knows what these are for, since Hangouts already has both of these features. They brought nothing new to the table and now are mostly unused.

We can only hope that Google decides to focus on one product sometime in the future, but that seems optimistic. For now, Hangouts is their priority, but I imagine that they'll be releasing a new messaging platform in the next year or two.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#307

Post by microcolonel »

I still wonder why we can't just do IM over SMTP. There's already tonnes of volume, the latency is basically good enough, and the format has lots of room for progressive enhancement through the addition of parts and formats.

As someone who administrates a small SMTP peering group with a friend, I'm constantly baffled by the reinvention of the wheel. Presence could be easily signalled by messages which degrade gracefully. i.e. send a human-readable email that says you're online or offline, with a presence header verified by DKIM/SPF/DMARC, or you could even revive Finger. Use whatever protocol between the mailserver and the client.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#308

Post by abakker »

shmerl wrote: post #291
beagle3 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because their old one was an open standard, and they were effectively the only one open one (and the last open one standing). So I find it totally reasonable that they stopped caring about it (and probably would again if another major player did).

I find it a very lame excuse. If they care about it, it shouldn't depend on others. In the end, it shows they didn't care enough.

Probably costs a bunch for not that much convenience though. Tragedy of the commons in action.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#310

Post by djsumdog »

roylez wrote: post #257
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You do realize how firewalls work, right? You have iptables and ip6tables. Sure you need entries for both, and sometimes ISPs forget, but it's easily implementable in all major routers and operating systems.
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