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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

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Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#91

Post by pfarnsworth »

Google has the talent and the flexibility to make the very best instant message client that would be useful for everyone... but they fucked it up somehow.

It means they really don't care, which shows in their product. My chats often get lost or delayed. I can't control my "contact" list, and there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to except they don't want to allow it. I see my friends who have died 3 years ago still on it, and I can't remove them unless I block them. If my contact is "Off the Record" they don't even show up in the list, which is infuriating.

I would love to know the reason why they let Gmail and Gchat go. My killer app for the Mac is iMessage, mainly because it integrates my text messages and Gchat into a single client. It's so convenient throughout the day for me.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#92

Post by crankylinuxuser »

pasbesoin wrote: post #59
notwhereyouare wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS

Exactly. There's a reason users/clients have come to fear the Google acquisition of a product they've come to depend on and in which they've vested hopes of continued improvements and solutions. At least Google hasn't outright put a bullet in Voice, yet.

Have any recommendations for commercially similar solutions, that also support a proper SIP interface?

I'm preparing for that day, when GVoice dies.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#94

Post by vxNsr »

smt88 wrote: post #18
djsumdog wrote: post #10

I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade. Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction. I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having…

Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.

Unfortunately, they recently remembered they have it and have begun removing features and options.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#95

Post by snitko »

oldcynic wrote: post #21

Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk. Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now st…

Have you tried Telegram? It's the best.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#96

Post by zanny »

cbhl wrote: post #44
andrepd wrote: post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will interface with the underlying protocol.

My only gripe about Matrix is the lack of a good desktop client, but at the same time trying to wire WebRTC into a desktop app feels almost as bad as C++03 did. Gstreamer just got support for it, but I have no idea if thats enough to implement voice / video conferencing in a Matrix implementation.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#97

Post by thinkloop »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
CydeWeys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there. ...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

the answer is... Google

> In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#99

Post by zmmmmm »

Hangouts may be a disaster but even so it is still in my eyes the best messaging solution in that it is truly cross platform, most people have accounts (even if they don't know it, via google accounts), it supports at least some open protocols (remnants of XMPP still works) and does all the essential things (voice, video, text chat, presence, etc). I honestly think that Google's best move still would be to drop everything else and go back to Hangouts / Talk as the single solution.

The problem is that the whole space is a nightmare where none of the players actually has the best interests of the users at heart.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#100

Post by thinkloop »

freeflight wrote: post #89
craftyguy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.

Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.

I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?
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