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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#371

Post by marktangotango »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #317
kristopolous wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Lazy" like it's an insult when in fact it's the highest praise?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#372

Post by Hexcles »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #227
shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.

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.

Unfortunately this is not the fact. While some ISPs are experimenting with IPv6, the vast majority are not on that train. Indeed, IPv4 address space has practically run out in China already, but many ISPs are taking the nasty NAT-like approaches, Carrier-grade NAT [1] for example. And it is particularly common in mobile. So far, IPv6 is only (relatively) well accepted among universities (CERNET [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERNET

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#373

Post by collinmanderson »

djsumdog wrote: post #302
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

How long have you been sending mail from your latest IP Address?

I run some websites that have their own mail servers. One thing you didn't mention which can help is to be sure to use an email signature. Basically short emails are more likely to be flagged as spam, especially if there's an attachment.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#374

Post by jpindar »

st3v3r wrote: post #340
ungzd wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"On Android they changed "Email" client to "Gmail" client." No, they didn't. Those are two separate apps. The Email one is part of AOSP. The Gmail one is part of Google Apps. Although many OEMs roll their own email client, as part of their custom skin.

On my Nexus 4, (Android 5.1.1), when I click on what used to be the email icon, I get a screen that says "Email has moved. The Gmail app now lets you view all of your email accounts." It has only one option (and a help link). That option is "TAKE ME TO THE GMAIL APP".

How do I get to the plain email client?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#375

Post by uvatbc »

djsumdog wrote: post #318
MaxLeiter wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Rocket Chat (https://github.com/RocketChat) is a totally OSS Slack alternative.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#376

Post by tw04 »

danudey wrote: post #268
shmerl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Page says there he would like to see more open standards used, and he is sad the industry isn't moving in that direction. So why isn't any of their new IM technology an open standard?

Because being constrained by existing standards, rather than being free to make the changes to the protocol that you think will make the product better, is a huge trade-off. The benefit is that your users get that interoperability with e.g. MSN Messenger or Skype or whatever. However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications bu…

Then I assume their standards and implementations are completely open, and they allow third parties to federate?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#377

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cortesoft wrote: post #210
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And what if they don't publish the protocol? Do we block downloads of their client? Even if we assume they are American companies, and we can sue them if they violate the rule; how on EARTH would we define an IM protocol broadly enough to avoid an easy avoidance of the law, but narrowly enough to not basically block all proprietary protocols?

Good questions.

If a company doesn't publish the protocol in use within, let's say 3 months of a valid request by a third-party then they'd be liable to a fine, perhaps something like $1 per day per registered user, plus costs of government and registered third parties in pursuing the interoperability request.

Small companies might escape, but if Facebook tried it they can't really run away. You'd need to be able to issue notices to ISPs to block those convicted of breaking the law, such orders are already part of UK law (against torrent discovery websites for example). Again you'd get some leakage but big providers like Microsoft couldn't feasibly expect enough customers to move to VPNs to bypass such a block.

IM client definition could be hard but in practice you'd have clauses requiring a judge to decide if the traffic exchange amounted to an IM communication. I see no problem with having a broad definition, if the definition were narrow then it would just get worked around. The definition would probably include email as a subset.

Were there other person-to-person communications protocols you are concerned would fall in the scope that definitely shouldn't be open?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#378

Post by p1mrx »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #227
shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.

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.

The Great Firewall likely affects the reliability of everybody's stats, but China seems to be way behind the US in terms of IPv6 deployment. (- https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

- https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN vs https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/US

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#379

Post by emmelaich »

shmerl wrote: post #186
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.

> I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think I could support it I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.

And everything else would have slowed down because of resources (human and other) devoted to ipv6, and the complexity of ipv6.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#380

Post by hkdobrev »

OK, Google Talk was a dead man walking for some time now. Even if it's not a nice decision for open standards at least they made a final decision whether they are either improving it or killing it. However, Google have completely lost their mind with messengers. GTalk, Hangouts, Messages, Messenger, Allo, Duo, Chat, Meet. Some available only on mobile. Some supporting SMS, some working only with SMS. Allo having G assistant in chat, G assistant is only with voice on their pixel phone. The tipping point was when both Hangouts and Messages competed to handle my SMS messages and when Hangouts won because of Gmail integration, they removed SMS from it. They really need to get it together.
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