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Google talk circa 2008 was a lot nicer than Hangouts is now, too. The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a sham
by xiaoma 11y ago
Google talk circa 2008 was a lot nicer than Hangouts is now, too.
The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.
- eru 11y agoThey are trying hard now to brink Hangouts back from the brink.
- agentdrtran 11y agoAre they? What have the done recently that made Hangouts better?
- toyg 11y agoThe first step was disentangling it from G+. I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.
- Gratsby 11y agoThey treat Hangouts like Yahoo would. Great product that they completely hosed by not caring about the userbase.
- hvidgaard 11y agoI wouldn't thrust Google for a second. They are not afraid to close down services with a short notice - so unless I can run my own "Hangouts" backbone it means nothing to me.
- eru 11y agoSorry, not sure how much I can say in public. (There's lots of stuff that's public, but I can't just do a knowledge dump, because it's not clearly separated in my mind.)
- y4mi 11y agoyou know, i stopped using hangouts not long ago. my mobile internet is sometimes really flaky and about 3 month ago messages didn't show up anymore after sending them. just nothing in the history for hours. eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.
- davedx 11y agoYet Hangouts is much lower friction and generally easier to use than Skype! What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.
- ahjones 11y agoI like Zoom (http://zoom.us/ http://zoom.us/). I used to use Hangouts, but it consumed a lot of CPU. The free Zoom account allows you to have up to fifty people in a room for forty minutes, or an unlimited length call with just two participants.
- antihero 11y agoWhat's it like on poor connections? What's the quality like?
- xiaoma 11y agoI just encountered Zoom this week! I had a conference with a German (I'm in Vietnam at the moment) and she sent me a link to it. I'd never heard of it and was a bit frustrated to need to install another plugin. But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser. 8.5/10, would use again.
- dorfsmay 11y agoI've used zoom.us quite a bit and was family impressed. There's also appear.in which is not as good, but doesn't have all the restrictions the free zoom.us tier has.
- continuational 11y agoThere's Firefox Hello: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/
- drdaeman 11y agoIs there any way to use it to start calls, except for being a Firefox user?
- z3t4 11y agoI guess "Internet telephone" is still an unsolved problem silly smile I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.
- kstenerud 11y agoEvery few years I make an attempt to get into SIP/voip, but so far my experience has always been the same: Wall-of-text like documentation that makes no sense, huge cryptic config files, tutorials that assume you already know everything or that just don't work, software that only works with such-and-such kernel, conflicting information scattered across the globe. It feels like trying to set up Slackware in the early 90s. After a few hours I get tired and drop it again.
- z3t4 11y agoLike most free software I had to find information here and there and do some trail and error. But it was a way better experience then for example compiling something (with deprecated dependencies). I really love apt-get!
- theinternetman 11y agoNot to mention Google Talk was a chat system first and foremost. Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.
- untog 11y ago> still don't understand why it ships as a plugin I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming. Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.
- cookiecaper 11y agoThe plugin is not required if you use Chrome.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoI agree. The app had fewer features and was pretty tight back then.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]