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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#351

Post by losvedir »

cptskippy wrote: post #195
TorKlingberg wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"online" as a concept has become a bit meaningless with mobile clients.

This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way. People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with pe…

> Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM someone

Eh, but you don't have to answer. I think the paradigm has shifted from a TCP-like approach where you're expected to respond in real time to a UDP-like approach where people fire off best-effort attempts to reach you and don't mind if they don't hear anything back.

At least, that's how it is among my peers. Reach out whenever, just don't expect a response.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#352

Post by ReverseCold »

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #322
scrollaway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3 letter non .com domains are your friend, plenty of those left for cheap

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#353

Post by i336_ »

danudey wrote: post #260
colordrops wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it. IM has become a fundamental communication mechanism. Imagine how held back society would be if we had 50 different voice standards rather than the singular phone system we have now. IM needs to be forcefully standardized.

Korea mandated through legislation that all online shopping had to go through ActiveX controls, because that was the only way to guarantee secure encryption at the time. Now it's practically the least secure way to online shop and even Microsoft recommends not using ActiveX, but it's a huge amount of work to strip that infrastructure out and make everything work 'properly' so it's still an issue even today. In short,…

That was interesting to google.

The first link I got: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/02/south_korea_to_depo...

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#354

Post by hocuspocus »

rspeer wrote: post #239
Siecje wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Messages!

And is that the same as or different from "Google Messenger" (an SMS app)? For bonus confusion, the Google Messenger icon just says "Messenger" and is nearly indistinguishable from Facebook Messenger, a completely different system. Better keep track of which blue speech bubble is which.

It seems Messenger was just renamed Messages, probably for this very reason.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#355

Post by sctb »

mistermann wrote: post #324
furyg3 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 power…

> ... the powerless non-autistic people in the room must be simply incredulous.

This doesn't belong on HN, so please omit these sorts of things from comments.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#356

Post by eigenvector »

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…

> So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones?

Talk had a full-featured native phone app way back in Android 2.1 with multiple device support, which Allo still doesn't have today. I used it religiously on my Nexus One.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#357

Post by smelendez »

netsharc wrote: post #132
ungzd wrote: post #52

This blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more not mentioned here): - Google Talk - Hangouts Meet - Hangouts Chat - Android Messages (something new, never heard of it) (And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS). How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.

But Facebook Messenger now wants to eat Snapchat's lunch and is offering Snapchat functionality. Great, that annoying cat lady who I'm "friends" with now can spam my Messenger app with pics of her cat. And I shared a picture with a friend and Messenger suggested I posted it to it's NotSnapChat. It's a single button inside the chat bubble, which makes me wonder if the publishing happens directly when I push that butto…

I've thought about this, too. All the chat and social network tools are constantly shifting their UIs and naturally, I guess, trying to highlight new features, which on a tiny phone screen is equivalent to making them easy to accidentally click.

The worst I've done is accidentally send a Facebook "thumbs up" in an inappropriate context, but it's easy to imagine how you could do much worse.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#358

Post by Raphael »

djrogers wrote: post #213
ianburrell wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the confusion is that they kept around the old clients and protocols. There is also a lot of confusion between the different apps and the platform. Google Talk is the original XMPP based chat system and was known informally as Gchat or Gtalk. There were web and desktop clients. Hangouts is the "new" proprietary messaging system from 2013. Google Talk and Hangouts are integrated at least for text messages but…

> find it interesting that there is less confusion about Apple Messages The reason people aren't confused is because Apple just renamed the app on people's iPhones but didn't screw anything up for them. They were never forced to switch from one app to another app, never had multiple apps that did roughly the same thing with competing standards, and they didn't migrate users from one platform to another losing data in…

Neither did Google. The Android app for Hangouts is com.google.android.talk

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#359

Post by smelendez »

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.

I think instant messaging also worked better in the PC era, when you knew people were active, "away" or altogether offline.

The messages I want to send or receive with a phone notification are a lot different from the ones people would exchange in the old days of IM.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#360

Post by delecti »

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…

Near as I can tell, Google Talk was just their name for being able to use Hangouts via XMPP.

Or rather, since it came first, Hangouts was their name for the plan to eventually remove support for XMPP.

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