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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

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Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#381

Post by pbhjpbhj »

scrollaway wrote: post #133
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom // Can you expand on that. Are Discord using someone else's closed protocol then in preference to their own (which they could open) or an already open one? Or did you mean "freedom" as in "ability to use lock-in", or something else?

They're using their own protocol. By freedom, I meant ability to iterate fast, break compatibility, not have to support unwanted clients etc. It's something you care about less once you're big, but it matters a lot when you're starting.

Presumably though even if you're iterating hard and breaking stuff, once you're out of alpha you're not going to introduce many backwards-compatibility-breaking protocol changes? I can see doing that for v0.1 to v0.2 and maybe from v1.9.x to v2.0 but nothing about making those changes seems incompatible with sharing the details of final protocols used in your production level clients.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#382

Post by pavel_lishin »

ucaetano wrote: post #228
pavel_lishin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we already have GSM and LTE, and who knows what else? And I'm not aware of any legislation for the use of those over others. As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.

GSM and LTE use public goods (spectrum). Spectrum is owned by the public, and regulated as spectrum is a limited resource. IP messaging isn't by any practical means a limited resource. > As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want. No. Spectrum is regulated in terms of what technology you can use, and kind of usage is…

> No. Spectrum is regulated in terms of what technology you can use, and kind of usage is supported.

Interesting! I was not aware of that. Thanks!

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#383

Post by pavel_lishin »

dom0 wrote: post #226
pavel_lishin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we already have GSM and LTE, and who knows what else? And I'm not aware of any legislation for the use of those over others. As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.

> As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want. Point I ("I have the right to use the frequencies") directly depends on point II ("whatever format I want"). When applying for using a certain frequency band, you have to specify usage and purpose, and you can't just change your mind, i.e. you can't apply for GSM frequenci…

Huh, I didn't know that. Guess it's time to pivot PavelLishinOverAir to become some sort of drone taco delivery service.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#384

Post by wtbob »

ceejayoz wrote: post #37
ouid wrote: post #12

God damn it. I do not want to use the Google Hangouts experience. Talk is a simple, elegant chat application. That is all I require and all I desire from Google. And I do not want to be patronized about how I actually want more "integration" with google products.

Hangouts is solid proof that no one at Google uses the multiple account support. If they did, it wouldn't be so awful. I click a hangout link for a work call and get "no one in the call". I have to add authuser=1 to the URL manually to see that it's actually that I don't have permission to it.

Hangouts is also solid proof that no-one at Google uses a non-Chrome browser on Android: trying to open a meeting hangout invite with anything other than Chrome as the default browser … opens a link to Google Play, not the Hangouts app.

I think this is because they use a different URL in meeting invites than the one registered for the Hangouts app.

It's been a bug for ages, and AFAICT they just don't care.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#385

Post by wtbob »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #183
shmerl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just failed. Google betrayed XMPP. You can blame Eric Schmidt for it. He gave some lame speech about how other instant messaging services aren't playing fair, so Google should also become a walled garden. And that was it. They made Hangouts and stopped caring about federated IM idea. It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatib…

It was a product driven decision. The number of active federations was absolutely tiny and the number of messages sent over those links even tinier. The amount of XMPP spam was catastrophic, and for most users the only knowledge they'd ever have of XMPP was when they got a friend request from buy.herbal.viagra@cheap-online-meds.com. XMPP federation was a great idea, but it never had adoption, and at some point Google…

Surely the right answer would have been to enable users to report spam invites, and to kill spam-sending domains. Kinda like what is already done for email. Could probably repurpose a lot of the existing infrastructure.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#387

Post by radiorental »

zekevermillion wrote: post #198
radiorental wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this relates to apps that utilise gtalk. Obihai is integrated with gVoice. Is there something I'm missing?

OK, if they still support XMPP for Gvoice then I am an idiot and I take back my comment. There was a threat awhile back that they would remove XMPP support for Gvoice (and thus I would have to pay for a service to use with my obihai). But that seemed to have gone on the back burner for awhile.

thanks for the clarification.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#388

Post by neogodless »

Pxtl wrote: post #265

Losing SMS from Hangouts is the bigger deal for me. I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user experience. I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as a hub - every chat system logs their history for a giv…

That was the joy of Windows Phone 7 which slowly got pulled back through 8/8.1/10. You used to be able to view a Contact and see all their profiles and communication histories in one place. But then they started to "part things out" and disassemble that goodness.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#389

Post by spronkey »

X86BSD wrote: post #251

I have come to loathe Google. Android is a tire fire mess. It's UI is horrible. And as bad as that is I have google fiber tv and that UI is even worse. Google does NOT get UI. Everything short of gmail that they have tried to make work has failed. They don't innovate. They create short lived products that bring in no extra ad revenue. Google is ripe for being replaced. It's big but so was MS. You may love Google to d…

Yep. I'd also mention how many viable alternatives to Google products and services they have shuttered because Google offer theirs "for free".

They have an almost-monopoly on the advertising space, their resources and size make it difficult for others to compete with them, and they treat their users like dirt. Wait sorry, they don't have any users, they have products. And they treat those like dirt.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#390

Post by upofadown »

hunter2_ wrote: post #159
FussyZeus wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world made it impossible to roll your own server, not Google. The proliferation of spammers in email has necessitated a cottage industry of security and filtering and all manner of mechanisms, automated and otherwise, to deal with the avalanche of bullshit streaming through that protocol. Google's the blame party for a lot of things, but not the loss of email freedom.

I don't know a whole lot about XMPP, but since it's federated, wouldn't it have the same avalanche? It seems like your choices are to use something interoperable and get spammed, or use a walled garden and you don't get spammed because the gardener has pitchforks.

Since this is IM the most you could do would be to generate a lot of requests to put the spammer on someone's roster list. In the unlikely event that a particular rogue XMPP managed to convince anyone to let them add some bogus users to their roster before it was blacklisted, it would take literally seconds to resolve the issue by removing them from your roster. So there isn't really any incentive to do spam over something like XMPP.

I have been on the federated XMPP network pretty much as long as it has existed and I have not gotten a single spam attempt. I guess I could post my jabber ID somewhere to make it more sporting (they need that to even try) but I really don't want to add random people to my roster. Email is intrinsically different that way.

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