91–100 of 504 posts
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I wish someone at Google would explain their overarching strategy and target. This piecemeal approach just reeks of no coherent plan.
I doubt they have any coherent strategy in the messaging space.
"Looks like June 26 may be the final curtain call for Google Voice. Google today announced that it's finally pulling the plug on Google Chat upon which Google Voice relies on the Asterisk platform."
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…
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…
Open federated protocols with no obligation for providers to upgrade as the security landscape changes are a betrayal of user security and privacy of the highest order.
HTTPS is only becoming reasonable because Google can use its monopoly power and forced upgrade mechanism to bully website owners into adopting better practices. If we had a fragmented ecosystem of many open source browsers with user-consent upgrades and similar market share like the open web people wanted, certificate transparency would remain academic.
Personally, I consider the median advocate of open federated protocols to be more culpable for the wholesale violation of user privacy than the median NSA staffer.
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…
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…
At this point I have no idea which Google chat client is which. A few years ago I remember having Google Talk on my android phone. Then after some random update the application disappeared from my phone and was replaced with hangouts. Now is Google Talk the same as GChat? Was Hangouts anything more than just a new branding for Google Talk? I have no idea. And what's up with this Google Allo thing? Again, it seems lik…
I'll never trust a Google messaging app because of that mess, and frankly I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Gmail/Inbox too and will probably move off it soon.
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Why do you say it's not a good idea?
Managing your own server is in general pretty hard (for sending or receiving). Unless you want to invest a lot of time in security and so on. It's simply way overwhelming. And if you don't invest in security, you are inviting trouble.
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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.
Stop spreading FUD. I've been running my own email server for a year without delivery issues to Gmail or Outlook/Office 365. Just make sure your VPS IP is not blacklisted, and play the DKIM/etc game. You'll be fine.
I’ve had proper DKIM, proper SPF, my IP wasn’t blacklisted anywhere.
But I still ended up in Spam.
So I had to send for about a year emails to friends every few days, replicating our discussions on WhatsApp etc (so they’d have organic content), and I’d ask them to mark them as "not spam".
Now I end up in their normal Inbox.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? Please comment instead what you think is wrong – or how else do you think I should get my personal domain trusted?
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> But at least now it works on phones? This is actually really, really important to people.
You are saying it like if XMPP never worked on phones.
But who cares?
Even if there were, hypothetically, no possible way to make XMPP work, and Google really needed a custom protocol, they could still have released public documentation for that protocol, and open source client and/or server code.
Indeed, that's sort of what they did in 2009 by creating Jingle, an XMPP extension for voice chat, and releasing libjingle. But no such luck for the new stuff.
I could understand giving up federation, maybe, since it creates a spam problem. Though for Google to throw up their hands on spam is a bit ironic, given that Hangouts sits inside Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering. But federation was never really necessary: most XMPP clients support multiple accounts, and it's not like there were a lot of huge XMPP services - only one, Google. You just add that as an account in addition to whatever smaller-scale/organizational XMPP servers you use. (You know, the thing people used to use before Slack.)
Similarly, most XMPP clients support multiple protocols, so for Hangouts to use a custom protocol is not the end of the world. Annoying, but if the benefits are clear enough… it's fine.
But no. Like with most messaging services these days, Hangouts' protocol isn't documented, and nobody has bothered to reverse engineer it. So you're stuck with the official clients. Maybe not the end of the world, since unlike the bad old days of Windows-only clients that left Linux users in the cold, today any desktop OS can use the web client. (And non-top-two mobile OSes don't have enough market share for people to care about their not being supported, and many of them can run Android apps.)
Not the end of the world, unless you want all your messaging services in one place - people used to see a lot of benefit in that, and there are a lot more services now.
Or you don't like the official design. Or you don't like bloated web clients. Or you prefer free software.
Sigh.
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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…
... and end to end encryption would be a thing. Open federated protocols with no obligation for providers to upgrade as the security landscape changes are a betrayal of user security and privacy of the highest order. HTTPS is only becoming reasonable because Google can use its monopoly power and forced upgrade mechanism to bully website owners into adopting better practices. If we had a fragmented ecosystem of many o…