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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#321

Post by WorldMaker »

pvg wrote: post #295
WorldMaker wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. It would have been much harder for Google to bootstrap at the time, if they hadn't been able to just point people to existing clients that supported XMPP. Third party clients made Talk useful faster (thus popularizing it). Sure, several of the third party clients were pretty good at reverse engineering weird protocols while also supporting o…

Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. Didn't it? I think it had a client from the get go https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_fo...

Interesting, I seem to recall an entirely different order of release. Blame it on personal bias (was already using XMPP at the time of Talk's release) and/or aging memory, I suppose.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#322

Post by SomewhatLikely »

scrollaway wrote: post #83
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".

I am reminded of the scene with the Slurm Queen in Futurama talking about "reintroducing Slurm Classic", as a jab on Coke. Realistically, if Google discontinued Gmail, people would move to other email providers. There's plenty of big ones. BTW: Want to avoid being caught in that eventuality, but don't want to stop using Gmail? Buy yourself a personal domain name (for your last name or some such) on https://www.gandi.…

Except it doesn't look more professional because you could only get smithfamilyemails.com or something equally unmemorable.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#323

Post by tiglionabbit »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #225
LyndsySimon wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a little dramatic, but I feel like I have to say it. Everything is ephemeral. Google's problem is that they don't keep services around long enough nor do they plan a reasonable migration strategy for when they shutter them.

Ephemeral is okay. But having three (four? I honestly don't know) competing services from a single provider and playing "guess which one's the evil twin" is shitty.

I miss Google Hello.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#324

Post by mistermann »

furyg3 wrote: post #172
eachro wrote: post #60

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…

Seriously. I somehow ended up using all of them, and I honestly don't know what's going on anymore. I thought my Talk got merged into Hangouts, if I start a chat in Gmail it's sometimes findable in my iOS hangouts app, and sometimes it's not. A while ago the Voice team asked me to merge Voice with Hangouts, which I did because clearly the service was dead. This seemed like a plan... your SMS chats are just chats in H…

It's so disorganized you wouldn't believe it if someone told you this is how a company actually approached IM, and not just any company, but the biggest internet company in the world. I literally have no idea what I'm supposed to be using now. Can I get google hangouts messages (is that even a thing?) and sms in the same app now somehow?

I'd love to be a fly on the wall where these decisions are being made, the powerless non-autistic people in the room must be simply incredulous.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#325

Post by shmerl »

abakker wrote: post #308
shmerl wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the case with most of interoperability / standardization efforts. But without it, the whole situation ends up being the current mess.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#326

Post by comex »

djsumdog wrote: post #315
comex wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As they say, Works For Me. Admittedly, I don't know how many important emails I've lost over the years, but I don't remember ever being contacted elsewhere about an email that turned out to be in spam. I have a bad memory so I might be forgetting some instance, but if so it must not have been terribly important, or I'd remember it… On the flipside, there have almost never been any false negatives. I remember being quite annoyed a while back when there was a brief period where a trickle of spam got through. Other than that, I've been spam-free.

(I also remember being IMed by spambots using XMPP federation a few times.)

This does come at the cost of letting Google see all my email. I'm not happy about that, but I'm skeptical that a fully encrypted solution could provide filtering as effective. Certainly a self-hosted solution cannot.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#327

Post by shmerl »

marssaxman wrote: post #292
shmerl wrote: post #32

I'm pretty upset at Google about how they handled IM. It basically cost me more than a half of my contacts (who use Google), since first XMPP federation with Google Talk stopped working when Google refused to support server to server encryption, and now it's being dropped altogether. So much for moving things forward, instead of falling into the dark ages of incompatible balkanized instance messaging services.

That decision basically killed instant messaging for me. I miss it, but there just isn't any critical mass anymore. I could run half a dozen different messaging apps, each one reaching some subset of my friends, most of whom are never available anyway, but the old situation where it was easy to keep in touch with people via chat just doesn't exist anymore.

> That decision basically killed instant messaging for me.

I feel the same way.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#328

Post by WorldMaker »

scrollaway wrote: post #269
WorldMaker wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has nothing to do with that. Put yourself in the shoes of the people behind a new messaging platform that needs a competitive advantage. Using XMPP is a massive technical restriction, and would give almost no benefits (Discord gets to be opinionated on how servers and channels are organized). Discord's product isn't a hosting service, their product is the quality of the service as well. This quality would be impossib…

Has nothing to do with what?

Again, power consumption/connection lifecycle isn't directly a competitive advantage because your user doesn't care so long as it works. (Slack and FB Messenger seem to have terrible power consumption and connection lifecycles for mobile but also seem to be doing just fine.)

(Not to mention those are also things that could be fixed in an open standard, if people cared to contribute that effort. The unfortunate reality is that isn't a competitive advantage either.)

The competitive advantage is to find excuses to dismiss open standards, whether the arguments are technically or factually correct is another matter, and build walled gardens.

But more crucially to my previous point, being technically superior isn't really a competitive advantage if a user doesn't notice it and in fact, can slow one from getting first mover advantage by shipping something/anything faster and sooner. I really don't think that on a power consumption or connection lifecycle standpoint any of the closed source protocols are really all that much better, and we have mostly nothing but anecdotes to trade on that question because the companies want to maintain their secret sauces.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#329

Post by eugeniub »

erpellan wrote: post #102

"Collaborate on standards. Compete on quality" Or something, I'm probably butchering the quote. There's a reason we can play CDs from any manufacturer in every manufacturer's player. Likewise SD cards, VHS videos, DVDs... The importance of working with your competitors was well understood in the 1980's. Seem's it's a lesson we need to learn again: https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-an...

I don't know how well this translates to the software space. Of course, it's great that there are some standards, like HTTP, that are in common. When it comes to communication, standards like email and XMPP aren't proving that useful. Email is incredibly insecure and XMPP doesn't have much usage, and new features are lacking in both. Meanwhile, communications services that have implemented open standards in a non-federated way like WhatsApp, Signal, and Slack are soaring.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#330

Post by pvg »

WorldMaker wrote: post #321
pvg wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. Didn't it? I think it had a client from the get go https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_fo...

Interesting, I seem to recall an entirely different order of release. Blame it on personal bias (was already using XMPP at the time of Talk's release) and/or aging memory, I suppose.

I remembered it exactly the other way round and also wasn't sure. It's curious/disturbing that events barely over a decade past are difficult to google. 'What was the first gtalk client'. 'When was gtalk integrated into gmail'. 'When did gtalk get an OS X client'.
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