Google Talk Is Being Discontinued • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#431

Post by Markoff » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 6:44 AM UTC

and meanwhile I use for communication email, SMS and Skype longer than these Google products, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber and Wechat exist

only thing I have added is Signal because why not have one more messenger if it's bundled with SMS anyway

when living in China was forced to use Wechat but got rid off that spyware immediately after moving outside, them had short stint with Facebook Messenger (Lite) until I decided it's not worth to do any business with Facebook which is reason why I don't have WhatsApp

I think I provide enough options for people to reach me with email, SMS, Skype (video/chat), Signal (video/chat)

so in the end i have 4 apps in phone covering all my communication - AOSP Email, AOSP Dialer, Skype Lite and Signal

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#432

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #428

Google wants to be like Apple. Lean and mean but it's got a big problem. They want to release and try new things but also still be focused on the big money makers. That means expect a lot of crap from Google like wave, allo, duo, buzz etc. Some hotshot inside Google wants a promo and pushes new products like popcorn. But Google management needs to show $$$ so they need to focus on the big cows: search & ads. In Steve…

[deleted]

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#433

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:01 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #271

danudey wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's a good point - especially important if someone's thinking about legislating a particular technology. On the other hand, maybe in this case it would be enough to legislate a requirement for openness of the protocol? I.e. whatever it is, if it has enough many users, it has to be fully available to third party integrations.

What about SMS? Everyone has it, it works, and is usually fairly instant. It's not very feature rich, but could there be an SMS 2.0 protocol that was backward compatible?

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#434

Post by pinpeliponni » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:06 AM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #229

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…

Why Google felt betrayed by Microsoft: Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie... Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).

Microsoft does support full federation. As long as you federate Skype servers. I know that's a bit lame, but since they bundle most of their products with most of their other products in licensing, no one in business seems to care.

Google doesn't do even that, as they don't offer anything on-site (anymore). They have seriously failed on business markets. I don't know about consumer market, because I mostly just send dick pics for the giggles to random people I don't know.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#435

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:09 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #415

jsz0 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IM needs to be forcefully standardized. This is totally crazy to me. It would be like the government legislating when and where people have spoken conversations with each other.

No, it's not. What you're proposing would be like the government saying you can only use this specific service, which may be run by the government, to communicate with others. Standardizing IM is making is so that if you want to talk to your friend across the country you're able to using different applications but the same protocol. Forcefully standardized would be mandating any messaging app that's used in the count…

How would this look different to SMS, except that the protocol might be more feature rich.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#436

Post by rrix2 » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:24 AM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #352

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

then all those signup forms with bad regular expressions can ruin your afternoon. I maintain an obscure .com only because the various gTLDs i could use regularly fail these naive validations. Some sites dont even properly handle ccTLDs

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#437

Post by krzyk » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:25 AM UTC

munin wrote: post #45

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…

Don't forget Allo in the mix, from Google, that could replace Hangouts! Take a product people use, and replace it with something people don't, then replace that with something that people also don't use.

Isn't Allo video only? Hangouts is first-text, with optional video.

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#438

Post by Markoff » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:33 AM UTC

mads wrote: post #345

WithHighProb wrote: post #218

LOL years ago someone in mainland China copycat ICQ. Now the company he founded is known as Tencent.

Well, to be fair, WeChat is a pretty good application.

your phone battery would beg to disagree plus no SMS implementation aside that all content including private messages is monitored and censored

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#439

Post by krackers » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:42 AM UTC

Liuser wrote: post #115

smdz wrote: post #18

GTalk was an amazing simple-to-use application. Should I say it was simpler than Skype. I don't like hangouts at all.

Their Chrome plugin was also wonderful. Keyword "was". It used to be a discreet window that persists across tabs, which you could minimize and expand from the lower right corner of your screen. They killed it and now it's an awful behemoth google hangouts window. Really disappointing.

https://github.com/dhleong/hangr

is a really neat replacement. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much longer hangouts as a whole is going to last (didn't they say they were discontinuing it from consumer space?)

Re: Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

#440

Post by icebraining » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 7:44 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #370

icebraining wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that companies forced to do this would create abstruse formats, and then even misimplement them, to thwart those trying to interoperate.

Which would be obvious, flout the law, and allow for legal action to be taken. The company itself has to use the format for live message exchange, have to publish a full working protocol document. With OOXML Microsoft aren't required to be able to read & write a files correctly when it's written to the protocol. As I envisage it the requirement would be to open the protocol actually used "on the wire"; again with Wor…

Will it be obvious? How? Browsers often fail to implement open standards like CSS, even when they have nothing to gain, it's just that shit's hard.

Microsoft don't use OOXML as primary.

Sure they do, that's what .docx files are. They've been the default since Office 2007.

Microsoft was compelled to create and implement the standard so that governments can comply with their requirements to use "open standards". And they followed all the steps, including getting it past ISO, despite the mess that the format is. And so governments can now tick the "open formats" box when purchasing Office. It's all a sham, and I don't see how it'd be otherwise with this proposed law.