I didn't know there was a .google TLD. Scary.
Updates to our Google Voice apps
341–350 of 364 posts
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. They pushed me from voice to hangouts for all the group SMS and MMS support. So now I have some chat history in voice and some in hangouts which is impossible to search through unlike with voice. Now they want me to go back to voice. What the hell is going on at Google? Is there anyone with an actual strategy for anything? I thought about getting Google Fi, but right on their page they said if you move fro…
There are tons of companies in this space; have you considered actually doing the "pay for the service" plan and evaluate these options? What did they not do that you wanted?
Could you please list some? I've looked, and I did not find tons, and I was actually less convinced of the quality of what I found than of Voice! It's gotten to where I considered rolling something with Twilio et al.
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem seems to be inability to aim. Google fired a ballista at Facebook with G+ and missed completely.
I read an essay on HN few weeks ago which said that the problem with G+ was that the higher mgmt at Google thought FB is famous because of a nicely designed product (rather than network effect), so they released a good product G+, it is somewhat a good product but it missed the train. Plus it has circles, it isn't intuitive.
I actually like G+ in principle. They already had the option to create a basic profile for your Google account which was good for those of us who already used Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, etc. from them. I think they figured they had all of the pieces to make a "better Facebook" and compete in that space, but as you say, network effects are strong.
I know a ton of people who set up a G+ profile and I found both the web version and mobile app to be superior to Facebook's offering. Plus they had better image hosting and they had good text/video chat before FB updated theirs.
But in the end it comes down to critical mass of users (and particularly, non-early-adopters) on Facebook. You might get your other peers to try out a new service if you're into trying out new sites/services but unless you get everyone to make (and use) a profile the way most people seem to at least have a Facebook account, you're stuck maintaining two profiles on two sites and switching between them depending on who you want to share that update or photo or link with.
In the end it didn't matter if they had a modestly better site or mobile app because nobody wanted to post to two sites. And since, unlike email, these things don't operate on any sort of standard protocol, you can't just switch your client and let grandma keep using her old one so it fizzled as a FB competitor.
(I still use it for several niche interest groups though. Also I think circles are vastly superior to whatever Facebook has for granular control of who you share something with.)
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#344I used to use my Google Voice number as my primary contact number, but when development of the product seemingly died for three years without addressing outstanding issues with group MMS or picture messages, I migrated back to my regular cell number. I've already told all my friends to forget my Google Voice number. I've changed my preferences in every service I use to contact my regular cell number. Now Google is so…
It's a little strange to read accounts like this. I've been using Voice continuously for years now, and ported my old number into it. There were a few years when it kinda sucked (yes, I also lost group/mms messages with no warning), but since the integration with Hangouts (2014? 2015?), I've been quite happy with it again: group messages work, pictures in messages work, etc. Hangouts isn't perfect and still has lots…
I wanted to do this, as I have the same situation: bad cell connection in the house. But the voice quality on Hangouts was so bad I had to give it up. The audio cuts out every few seconds, for example. This is sitting right next to the router with a Fios connection.
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one-two punch of killing Google Talk and Google Reader in quick succession really hurt my confidence in Google. (Wave too, to a lesser extent.)
Wave I still miss. It was like it didn't go gangbusters straight away so google binned it off. Any it only didn't work because of the stupid JS hijacked chat scroller, where was its promise as a new chat protocol.
I've said before that there is probably an interesting alternate universe out there was G+ was built on top of Talk, Reader, and Wave instead of replacing those three. They really did throw out several babies in trying to throw out their over-silo-ed bathwater. One can only imagine the world in which the UX work applied to the G+ walled garden Facebook clone effort had instead been used to polish (a federation-capable) Wave and make it a consumer friendly product...
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#346Maybe now they'll address the Takeout format to return a sane, digestible form of GV data, rather than the frequently-broken HTML form that it currently returns.
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hangouts can't receive MMS without special support from your mobile operator. Operators such as T-Mobile and... Google Voice... have been known to insufficiently provide that support.
All operators have worked fine for over two years. They announced this back then.
Okay, you can announce that everything is fine, but it just ain't so. I missed MMS messages on T-Mobile in 2016.
Google's suggested solution, besides twiddling cellular network settings and asking your friends to keep texting you until it works, is to stop using Hangouts [1].
[1] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/6318464?hl=en
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#348I used to use my Google Voice number as my primary contact number, but when development of the product seemingly died for three years without addressing outstanding issues with group MMS or picture messages, I migrated back to my regular cell number. I've already told all my friends to forget my Google Voice number. I've changed my preferences in every service I use to contact my regular cell number. Now Google is so…
I had a GV as the primary in my resume for years. Last year, many recruiters emailed me that calls weren't going through with a recording stating "The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time". I asked in GV forums to not avail. I don't know how many nice job opportunities I missed when hiring managers saw my application but could not call me back until I detected the issue. Ended up switchi…
That recording isn't in Google Voice. Maybe you had a forwarding phone on your Google Voice account that was eating your calls. (Maybe you had an old one you forgot to take off, and someone else took over the number and it was doing that.)
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#349Why didn't they just improve Hangouts? I don't know anyone that uses Allo and as far as I know there's no desktop client. I linked Voice to Hangouts so I could get all of my messages in one app on both my phone and within gmail. Now it seems like they want me to split everything up between 3 apps (Voice for SMS, Allo for chat on mobile, and Hangouts for chat on my computer) that fewer and fewer people are using. Why…
We did a user survey a year and a half ago, got a flood of feedback, and overwhelmingly users asked us to invest in the Google Voice standalone experience. It didn't mean that there aren't passionate users who want the Hangouts version.
Despite what a lot of the threads here are saying, honestly we did this based on user feedback and user research. Most people wanted this, even if they're not all on HN.
Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps
#350If you'd like to better understand the background behind the new Google Voice apps, check out my G+ post here.