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Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#41

Post by pdkl95 »

nextos wrote: post #19
inopinatus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

Yeah, it didn't make any sense. It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. XMPP has its share of problems, but it's designed as an extensible protocol. Google's Jingle addon to XMPP was actually quite nice, although it took quite some time to get polished. Once they had it right and it was gaining some traction, they drop it in favour of a proprietary solution...

> It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts.

It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization.

If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#42

Post by th0ma5 »

badsock wrote: post #34
inopinatus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

When it was coined "Don't Be Evil" was a reference to Microsoft, who at the time was an especially bad actor in the industry, even for them. Dropping support for a protocol is one thing, but actively sabotaging open protocols like MS did is quite another.

You're absolutely right except for limiting the bad actor qualities of MS to just at that time. While they have made inroads to more open systems, they continue to do heavy handed things, e.g. the misleading and intrusive Windows 10 upgrades.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#43

Post by bpchaps »

nnain wrote: post #38
bpchaps wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is how hangouts looks on a 4k monitor: https://imgur.com/lPkNnhR This is its default size and behavior when in a browser: https://imgur.com/bXL1Ezn This. Is. Horrible. I have some very, very unkind words for the person or team or manager who decided to make hangouts show as few lines as possible. It didn't used to be this way.

You're mixing GChat with Hangout. GChat was(is) minimal and very useful.

You're right. Point still stands that google's design choices are god awful these days, though.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#44

Post by drumdance »

nnain wrote: post #35

Gchat was (and is) wonderful -- minimal and elegant. I never understood why Google was so hell bent upon trying to move the users from Gchat to Hangout. They would have enough data to know the number of times users clicked 'no' to moving to the new interface! Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds like such a…

I thought Google Wave had huge potential but the rollout was so poorly handled. It was a group app that only called people in by invitation, so I couldn't add my team members without them having to go through a signup and wait for approval process, killing all momentum.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#46

Post by aftbit »

Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed:

1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc.

2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search.

3. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.

4. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.

I had high hopes for http://shout-irc.com/, but it ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I mentioned.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#47

Post by nostrademons »

Frompo wrote: post #36
cromwellian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives. I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural…

What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp? Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...

People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN.

Since a critical feature of a messaging app is "my friends are on it", that gave MSN/FB/AIM a huge advantage over GChat, and had they not turned off XMPP integration, they would have bled off users until it was only used by small pockets of people, all of whom were on GChat (eg. Googlers).

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#48

Post by reactor »

aftbit wrote: post #46

Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…

http://www.mattermost.org/ is doing it

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#49

Post by zardeh »

pdkl95 wrote: post #41
nextos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it didn't make any sense. It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. XMPP has its share of problems, but it's designed as an extensible protocol. Google's Jingle addon to XMPP was actually quite nice, although it took quite some time to get polished. Once they had it right and it was gaining some traction, they drop it in favour of a proprietary solution...

> It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization. If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related an…

Wait are you saying that XMPP was forced out (solely) by Google, and that Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" market?

Not to mention that XMPP is a standard, not a competitor.

This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#50

Post by tizzdogg »

pkaeding wrote: post #17

> And there are even still some holdout users on old-style Gchat. I'm not sure if I'm one of those holdouts? I've been using gchat, mostly over XMPP (using adium), and sometimes in Gmail. I frequently search chat history in Gmail. I didn't realize that gchat had such a tumultuous history.

Yeah I still use it daily, and now I'm worried it's going away. I wonder how many holdouts there are out there?
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