Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 504 posts

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#311

Post by niftich »

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…

I don't disagree with your points but your timeline fudges the timescale quite a bit. I've researched this [1].

Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email.

To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and won messaging handily; its lead was cemented by the acquisition of WhatsApp on 2014-02-19, as Google continued to flail about.

In a post of mine last year [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#312

Post by shmerl »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #296
shmerl wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But they did start doing it with XMPP and kept it that way for a while.

So. They had to persist, and address deficiencies too. That's the only way to break the cycle.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#313

Post by djsumdog »

scrollaway wrote: post #69
cwyers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at least now it works on phones? This is actually really, really important to people.

I don't mean to diminish the importance of working on phones, however interoperability (at least as a third party) is also important and "not losing contacts" is pretty much at the top of the priority list. Hangouts failed both. Google had (no longer has, IMO) the clout to design and drive a solid, open source messaging protocol with a reference implementation, sitting in the inbox of hundreds of millions of users an…

I forgot about Allo. Didn't they bring back the Google voice app? Yea it makes no sense at all.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#314

Post by WorldMaker »

hprotagonist wrote: post #23

>XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be supported starting June 26. What does this actually mean?

XMPP Federation allows servers to talk to each other similar to how email works, and which is why XMPP addresses have always looked like email addresses. Up until June 26 you could (with some effort) run a server on your own domain and still chat with people on Google's XMPP servers.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#315

Post by djsumdog »

comex wrote: post #99
chrisper wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying it like if XMPP never worked on phones.

It didn't work well . But who cares? Even if there were, hypothetically, no possible way to make XMPP work, and Google really needed a custom protocol, they could still have released public documentation for that protocol, and open source client and/or server code. Indeed, that's sort of what they did in 2009 by creating Jingle, an XMPP extension for voice chat, and releasing libjingle. But no such luck for the new s…

> Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering.

If by world class you mean huge amounts of false positives and destroying the ability for people to send messages reliably between one another, then yes. It's totally world class .. a world class failure.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#316

Post by homakov »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #106
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…

fun fact, ICQ is doing just fine. They just stopped bothering staying in the English speaking game, it's now mostly a Russian thing. Doing quite well, still under active support and development.

"Advanced" runet users dropped ICQ for telegram long time ago

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#317

Post by tiglionabbit »

kristopolous wrote: post #275
james_pm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paradi…

I'm contracting with Google. This is exactly the kind of argument I've been tying to make to my boss for over a year but to no avail. They come up with pet names for me to express how weird they think that type of engineering is.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#318

Post by djsumdog »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #193
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…

Regarding IRC, how do you feel about ircv3 [1]? [1] http://ircv3.org

Are there any IRCv3 implementations? Is freenode planning on running it?

I'd love a totally OSS alternative to Slack. Maybe we'll see it with the recent Gitter acquisition?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#319

Post by tiglionabbit »

vidarh wrote: post #101
james_pm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Notice how Inbox has a "Gmail" link? Even Google appears to still concede that Inbox is missing sufficient features that some people need to be able to get back to Gmail from time to type (tried getting Inbox to stop putting things in your spam folder? Yeah, it's lacking a "Not spam" button)

I was going to say it didn't have a way to edit your filters, but it looks like that has appeared now. They're adding things bit by bit.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#320

Post by dandelion_lover »

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…

> there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.

https://meet.jit.si/ works just in the browser. What's the problem?

Post reply on HN