11 ms·

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

452 points by janvdberg 10y ago

some1else 10y ago
MSN Messenger was the future of messaging ICQ was the future of messaging IRC was the future of messaging Smoke signals were the future of messaging
tehabe 10y ago
Federated system are nice but clients for Jabber have very different quality. Some would support things you like others don't. For example iChat will always sent the background and forground colour of the chat bubbles with the message. If you added a photo to a Google Talk conversation, some people could see it others don't. I kinda liked what Moxie once wrote: the notification area of your mobile device is the new multi protocol client and since most IM services are using identifiers like phone number or email address instead of user names, the barrier to switch a service is lower. This is the one big advantage to use the user's address book as a social graph for IM.
sinzone 10y ago
For those who remember, it wasn't Gchat the "Slack" of Google but a project called Google Wave.
dade_ 10y ago
XMPP is a zombie protocol. Yes, it has clients that have better implementation of instant messaging and presence than any other, but it falls apart with real time communication such as voice and video (lol jingle) and there is no practical way of iteroperating with the PSTN. Further, federation of plain text and basic presence worked, but rarely anything more. Connecting with federated users makes no sense to end users, first they have to know it is possible, then they have to figure out how it works and then they learn most features don't work. Even if that wasn't awful enough, it was all dropped by the providers and no longer works. All commercial platforms are moving away from the protocol, and SIP is now the standard. Problem is that it isn't a great chat protocol for end devices (no standard concept for buddy lists being stored on a server or mobile clients, but many proprietary extensions work well). As for slack, it is a group chat with slick interface, other than the bizarre account/domain design. It has no encryption of data at rest, and I really wouldn't use it for confidential data. If you are going to use a proprietary closed source solution, at least consider using Cisco Spark. Now Matrix, it is almost too good to be true, grass roots open standards, federation that makes sense, encryption by design and doesn't lock users into yet another captive island (YACI?). It is also built with the concepts of accounts/SSO, true federation, real time communications in mind. I dream of the day we can kill the PSTN, but with something even more open... Sadly none of the commercial players today are interested. Any one company that thinks they will do it on their own has fallen for their own delusions. Microsoft Skype, Whatsapp and a hapless Google Hangouts... What a mess.
bluejekyll 10y ago
I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.
- wtbob 10y ago
  The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing.
  - CJKinni 10y ago
    > The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.
    - foobarbecue 10y ago
      But you can abstract that stuff in the client with a few lines of code and the user never needs to know! All the IRC web clients do it. mibbit used to be great, and then they mysteriously disappeared...
      - jasonkostempski 10y ago
        Mysteriously disappeared? I don't know anything about it's history but I happen to use something that, at least, goes by that name [1]. [1] https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&server=irc.gamesurge.net https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&serv...
    - Frompo 10y ago
      What? For irc you can connect without an account, how is that harder than forcing people to register on github first? Oh, you mean its easier for people who already have github account? Who are these people that create accounts on a hosting service for one of the more complicated version control systems but find connecting to ftp servers and entering cli commands too daunting? If you want to talk about confusing, in gitter I can navigate to a room and see what happens in it but I need to press an extra button to actually be able to talk in it? What? Rooms, private chats and /me? Many parts of gitter doesn't make sense if you don't know the whole chat paradigm that irc created. Gitter derives it utility purely in the better web client and its custom built integration with github.
kinkdr 10y ago
ICQ actually predates AIM
- stormbrew 10y ago
  It doesn't say it didn't (that I can see). I think it's saying AIM brought the concept into the mainstream, and I think that's probably more or less true in the US. Interestingly (to me, at least), this seemed to be pretty reasonable. No one I knew in Canada had AIM, except if they talked to Americans regularly. MSNM was very very popular, though. And ICQ before it.
  - Frompo 10y ago
    Yeah, you needed aim if you wanted to chat with some americans when I played utopia. Meanwhile the big IM breakthrough among my less technical friends was msn. I quite quickly found a stand along multi-protocol client and I've stuck to that mode of managing IM since when I could control it.
  - stormbrew 10y ago
    Reasonable should be regional. Noticed after the edit window, damnit.
chickenbane 10y ago
I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo. I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously, it's also simultaneously terrifying. Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. I don't get this. Just because you're using a device that has historically been tied to a specific method of identification doesn't mean that you have to limit yourself to that? Should desktop chat clients start only identifying people by IP addresses?
  - detaro 10y ago
    Indeed. Nearly all phone-number-as-identity services fail at allowing multiple clients (Whatsapp and Signal have at least something, but not perfect either), which is probably the biggest issue I have with newer messengers. And it makes changing my phone number more annoying, for IMHO no good reason. Allow people to configure their phone number for discovery if they want, but don't make it the primary identifier.
  - Jordrok 10y ago
    +1 to this. I have never wanted to bind my identity to my phone number and never will. This is an anti-feature to me.
- 10y ago
mmastrac 10y ago
We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.
- zatkin 10y ago
  My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.
  - bazqux2 10y ago
    XMPP is a poor protocol. I can completely understand why they would want to break compatibility.
    - Bromskloss 10y ago
      Is there anything particular about XMPP that is poor?
- inopinatus 10y ago
  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.
  - mike_hearn 10y ago
    It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Features that existed in GChat but didn't map well to XMPP were harder to implement. 4. The XMPP protocol sucked on mobile and sucked in web clients, and therefore Google's own clients were not using it any more. New extensions like Jingle were more like entirely separate protocols than small upgrades. Federated chat protocols are the sort of thing that intuitively sound nice, but networks that implement them inevitably end up being killed off by closed, proprietary competitors that are simply a whole lot better. Email hangs on, kinda, but I passively await the day that the email system is killed off by a closed network. It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. Moxie Marlinspike has written some thoughts on why federated protocols are yesterday's solution here: https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value.
andersonmvd 10y ago
I may be a resistant one, but I prefer and still use gtalk/gchat/hangouts over slack or any other tool. Slack requires either another tab, a new mobile app or a desktop app, which isn't that great when switching between organisations. At least on my Ubuntu Linux. Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored. If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple, that would be great IMHO.
ronnier 10y ago
To this day, ICQ is still the best messenger I've used.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- MildlySerious 10y ago
  May I ask what made it the best messenger for you? I hated every second I spent on ICQ. The ad-infested client, the fact that if someone else thought 24px purple comic-sans was their identity, I would have to deal with it.. The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an Emoji it was converted back to its text version.
  - ronnier 10y ago
    I mean pre-ad days.
pkaeding 10y ago
> 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.
- tizzdogg 10y ago
  Yeah I still use it daily, and now I'm worried it's going away. I wonder how many holdouts there are out there?
  - prutschman 10y ago
    I rely extensively on Gchat via Adium.
pkaeding 10y ago
> 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.
jalami 10y ago
The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems to be centralize everything. I think it's because centralized systems are easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it? Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it. I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start demanding DRM-FREE social relationships. Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede control of all facets of your business to third-parties".
- Frompo 10y ago
  Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working well in my desktop client :(
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    > Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. And critically: that standard needs to not be XMPP. It's a mess of a protocol that's difficult to implement, and which fails to adequately support many common use cases (e.g, mobile clients, file transfer, and group chats).
nipponese 10y ago
Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.
- aerovistae 10y ago
  Did you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs? The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays), and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded all of them by many years. I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the article. I can still dream. It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was 2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly impressive failure.
ec109685 10y ago
Slack nailed it with the notion of teams. You invite someone into a team and there's an instant tachonomy of conversation to join. The ability to be in multiple teams at once is hugely helpful as well.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Tachonomy isn't the word you meant to use there. In fact, it's not a word. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tachonomy http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tachonomy
  - SNACKeR99 10y ago
    http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Taxonomy http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Taxonomy
- swrobel 10y ago
  Yes but each requires its own username/password combo!
  - spronkey 10y ago
    This. Hideous and awful.
    - jhgg 10y ago
      Check out https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/
tbrock 10y ago
No, they are different. One feels like IM and the other feels like IRC.
nnain 10y ago
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 loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat. In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down. GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.
- drumdance 10y ago
  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.
  - nnain 10y ago
    Yeah, Wave created quite a buzz, at least within developers/early-adopters. It was complicated and heavy though. I didn't get fond of its features, for the few weeks that it existed.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I still click that button regularly. The "Google Talk" Gmail plugin still works better than the "Google Hangouts" one.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 10y ago
Right, they couldn't let it be its own thing. It always had to be under the umbrella of some other thing that nobody actually wanted. It's one thing to make something nobody likes, it's quite another to make something very popular and then drown it in social-sauce till its users don't want anything to do with it anymore.
rekoros 10y ago
Oh wow, we'll be adding three more services to this -- https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf No words.
aftbit 10y ago
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/ 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.
- amq 10y ago
  https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat
  - ronreiter 10y ago
    Rocket chat is awesome. It even has giphy integration!
- reactor 10y ago
  http://www.mattermost.org/ http://www.mattermost.org/ is doing it
  - 50CNT 10y ago
    Yup, been looking into it the last couple of days because Slack is devilishly slow in China, and it seems to cover most of the stuff you'd want from slack plus the things GP mentioned. Really cool stuff.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - fredrik-j 10y ago
Perceptes 10y ago
Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it enter people's consciousness as one of the most serious contenders for messaging systems. Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client (https://vector.im/ https://vector.im/). You can connect to the public server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec and the system are more promising than anything else out there today. If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my project, Ruma (https://www.ruma.io/ https://www.ruma.io/), which is a Rust implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.
- amelius 10y ago
  Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?
  - cpach 10y ago
    Moxie Marlinspike recently published an interesting essay that adressed this question. ”XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a ’living standard.’ Despite its capacity for protocol ’extensions,’ however, it's undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can't realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven't those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world? Like any federated protocol, extensions don't mean much unless everyone applies them, and that's an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren't consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone's choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn't support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn't only effect them, it effects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.” https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
stevewillows 10y ago
gchat was great. I really wish Google build on Hangouts to integrate SMS like iMessage. Having a proper desktop SMS client is the only reason I ended up going back to IOS a few months ago. I can understand why they dropped XMPP. I'm not sure if they really violated their 'don't be evil' motto as much as they recognized that other services were improving on their dime. I like Slack for corporate environments, but IRC is still top dog when it comes to interest-based real-time communities.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  If you use Google Voice the sms (and voice) integration is very seamless.
  - stevewillows 10y ago
    I should have mentioned that I'm in the neglected nation of the north. I do have a google voice number that was grandfathered in from Grand Central, but the GV number is in Seattle.
- insane_dreamer 10y ago
  I think Slack works best for closed project workgroups, whereas IRC is best for open and persistent communities.
homero 10y ago
I miss it
fh973 10y ago
I wonder why they never added drag and drop file transfer. If you understand it as a presence concept and not just "chat" I think this is a must.
frik 10y ago
IRC, XMPP, WebRTC, WebSocket and AJAX. Almost all common chat clients are based on one of these technologies. The most straight forward protocol to implement is certainly IRC. It works very well for group chats and is used by many open source projects and in house usage. FBchat and Gchat are based on a slightly non-standard XMPP, at least started from that point and turned less and less open. Maybe I am a forerunner, I used chat a lot more several years ago, and nowadays write a lot more (short) emails or just talk in person (or over VoIP with video). On the other side, we will chat/talk a lot with our personal software assistent in future.
dclowd9901 10y ago
Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts. It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform. No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Keeping a separate work account is easy. Just create one. I don't understand why people just don't do this more often.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts. What about Google Apps for Work? It's been around for a decade.
partycoder 10y ago
IRC was the future of messaging but until Slack came up with a different experience, people didn't know.
wodenokoto 10y ago
I remember Gchat as a constant struggle to try and turn off unwanted functionality in Gmail. I also remember Gchat as being one of a a number of a number of instant messaging options from Google that had very unclear market position and operability (I honestly didn't know that gChat was talking with Google Talk, I thought those where different) At least now, it is only Hangouts I can't log out of, and at least it doesn't show up in gmail.
andrewvijay 10y ago
I got my first girl friend, mini project approval in college and many more from that gtalk. I was devastated to know it was discontinued. They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Which would have been a good effort. Companies work so hard to create brand value in their products but Google unintentionally creates value and destroys them later on. Phew.
- icebraining 10y ago
  They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Then a lot of people would be claiming Google was being dishonest and tricking its users.
est 10y ago
> Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know Google nows that, but improvements upon Gchat is not best fit for OKRs and Googler's future resumes. Why not invent another wheel so you can show off next GoogleIO?
reuven 10y ago
When Slack first came out, and everyone got all excited about it, I was quite skeptical. I've been using Skype (and lots of other IM systems) for years; do I really want or need something new? The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop, in my browser, and on my phone. So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did it do the right things in a narrow technical sense? Absolutely. But without the slick, inviting, easy-to-use UI, it wasn't going to go anywhere. And now that Slack has critical mass, it's hard to imagine Google catching up.
- nly 10y ago
  Ultimately slack is just a proprietary IRC, with a solution for message persistence falling out its centralized design. IRCCloud and ZNC both solve the same problem. Its slick as hell, but still a walled garden.
  - reuven 10y ago
    Yes, this is my greatest regret and problem with Slack: Someone could have made amazing IRC clients (and servers), and kept it open to the world. It's a shame that a solved problem with open-source tools has been turned into a billion-dollar proprietary company.
lewisjoe 10y ago
A really big fan of Gchat here. What I was amazed at in the software was, how reliably it worked no matter how less your internet bandwidth is. The desktop GTalk app was tiny, handy and powerful. Back when I couldn't afford a wired internet connection in my home, I used to bridge my phone's 2G data to my computer and when nothing else worked with that tiny bandwidth, GTalk did. Hangouts - is just sad. It loads visibly delayed. Every conversation you click at, again takes milliseconds/seconds to load. Never had this cognitive delay in GTalk. I miss it.
inputmice 10y ago
Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations (https://Conversations.im https://Conversations.im) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…
- y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
  conversations is really nice. thanks for making it. one problem i have with it, that gchat solves really well, is how it behaves when you have a desktop client and conversations open at the same time. when someone using conversations writes to me, what i expect is that i get the message on my desktop, as well as on my mobile client. but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message, if on my phone or on my desktop client. this should not happen. it should just send it without the resource set, and let the xmpp server figure it out.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message Must be a bug (or OTR requirement, as OTR doesn't work with multiple devices). XMPP clients shouldn't require sender to choose the recipient's resource, unless sender is explicit that they want to target a specific device.
  - inputmice 10y ago
    This is a confinement of OTR. OTR was never made for modern day instant messaging. Use OMEMO or send unencrypted messages and you won't have this problem.
- Arathorn 10y ago
  inputmice: I hear your Conversations app is really nice, and it's great to see XMPP is evolving well. Rather than being defensive about XMPP and badmouthing matrix, perhaps we can just bridge both ecosystems and both sides and clients benefit from wider reach? Especially when some tech like interoperable E2E ratchet implementations is of direct use for both ecosystems. The two protocols have entirely different designs and philosophies and do different things. It's like claiming that NNTP competes with SMTP because you can uses them both to hold conversations. Please can we both just get along? :) In terms of matrix's usability: i'd say it's been very usable for the last 6 months or so - and given the size and activity visible to the matrix.org homeserver, others seem to concur.
sametmax 10y ago
We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble, works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one: emails. You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.
- tehrei 10y ago
  E-mails take an eternity to send and receive compared to IM.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Kinda. But much as I've appreciated it, for 30+ years now, SMTP is old and in the way. Something secure, flexible, workable, and open needs to replace it.
- SNACKeR99 10y ago
  SMTP is a store and forward protocol that in no way provides real time chat speeds. It is designed to be robust, not fast.
- gkop 10y ago
  Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Text messages are very slow, and nobody minds. People on iMessage don't see the difference. It's more a metter of perception. When you click on a mail, it takes a lot of time to type, then your UI have a delay to say it's sent, then you have this time taken by many clients to move your mail to the proper folder. But a proper mail-chat client would just make the message appear as sent, then to all the stuff in background, and you would just not see it slower than other chat. The time people take to answer you message is usually the bottleneck, not the network.
    - 10y ago
geniium 10y ago
Sorry, what's the purpose of this post? Really? Come on spend some real time with your family and friends and stop writing useless post like this one. Yeah your right : and people writing on walls in Stone Age were the precursors of Facebook! Damn.
erikb 10y ago
GChat was painful to use. IRC and Jabber are the predecessors.
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  Google Talk was based on Jabber, so you could log in to it via any Jabber / XMPP client.
bakhy 10y ago
Hangouts was horrible to me for just one reason - on the smartphone, it hid info on who is online right now.. perhaps this was designed to motivate us to send more messages, but it meant i could no longer easily know if someone might answer now, or if i better try sms/call/.. and then as of recently, Hangouts just fails to notify me of messages, or keeps re-notifying me of old ones, and now i barely use it any more. Google+ had a similar design decision, when it showed (don't know if this changed) friend suggestions without indicating if those people actually use Google+, or if your adding them to a circle will just spam them to join a social network they don't (want to) use. it's understandable that Google might want to do these things to grow their platforms, but without tact and understanding for what the users really want, they're achieving the opposite.
- curt15 10y ago
  At least now they've sort of restored the online presence indicators with the "last seen XXX ago", but I still don't understand what can be so hard about searching hangouts conversations on the phone. I can search through emails and through SMS. Why not hangouts?
ronreiter 10y ago
I made a mock that could explain how Google can still compete with Slack today. What do you think? https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?... (If there's anyone from Google here that likes the idea then drop me a line at ron.reiter@gmail.com)
wnevets 10y ago
The gchat UI was so much better than everything else out today. So simple and yet still very useful.
antoniuschan99 10y ago
I spent two years of my life focusing on chat and I think it's matured to the point of oversaturation in todays market. Chat itself should now be viewed as a commodity, it's the features that's built on top of it that will differentiate one platform over the other. Enterprise chat used to be a differentiator, but everyones doing that now too. I think document sharing (Dropbox, Google Drive) and chat are basically in the same place right now in that both have been democratized and both have an over saturation of similar services.

452 points by janvdberg 10y ago

MSN Messenger was the future of messaging ICQ was the future of messaging IRC was the future of messaging Smoke signals were the future of messaging

tehabe 10y ago

Federated system are nice but clients for Jabber have very different quality. Some would support things you like others don't. For example iChat will always sent the background and forground colour of the chat bubbles with the message. If you added a photo to a Google Talk conversation, some people could see it others don't. I kinda liked what Moxie once wrote: the notification area of your mobile device is the new multi protocol client and since most IM services are using identifiers like phone number or email address instead of user names, the barrier to switch a service is lower. This is the one big advantage to use the user's address book as a social graph for IM.

sinzone 10y ago

For those who remember, it wasn't Gchat the "Slack" of Google but a project called Google Wave.

dade_ 10y ago

XMPP is a zombie protocol. Yes, it has clients that have better implementation of instant messaging and presence than any other, but it falls apart with real time communication such as voice and video (lol jingle) and there is no practical way of iteroperating with the PSTN. Further, federation of plain text and basic presence worked, but rarely anything more. Connecting with federated users makes no sense to end users, first they have to know it is possible, then they have to figure out how it works and then they learn most features don't work. Even if that wasn't awful enough, it was all dropped by the providers and no longer works. All commercial platforms are moving away from the protocol, and SIP is now the standard. Problem is that it isn't a great chat protocol for end devices (no standard concept for buddy lists being stored on a server or mobile clients, but many proprietary extensions work well). As for slack, it is a group chat with slick interface, other than the bizarre account/domain design. It has no encryption of data at rest, and I really wouldn't use it for confidential data. If you are going to use a proprietary closed source solution, at least consider using Cisco Spark. Now Matrix, it is almost too good to be true, grass roots open standards, federation that makes sense, encryption by design and doesn't lock users into yet another captive island (YACI?). It is also built with the concepts of accounts/SSO, true federation, real time communications in mind. I dream of the day we can kill the PSTN, but with something even more open... Sadly none of the commercial players today are interested. Any one company that thinks they will do it on their own has fallen for their own delusions. Microsoft Skype, Whatsapp and a hapless Google Hangouts... What a mess.

bluejekyll 10y ago

I think gchat had a horrible ux. Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.

wtbob 10y ago
The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing.
- CJKinni 10y ago
  > The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history. I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.
  - foobarbecue 10y ago
    But you can abstract that stuff in the client with a few lines of code and the user never needs to know! All the IRC web clients do it. mibbit used to be great, and then they mysteriously disappeared...
    - jasonkostempski 10y ago
      Mysteriously disappeared? I don't know anything about it's history but I happen to use something that, at least, goes by that name [1]. [1] https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&server=irc.gamesurge.net https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&serv...
  - Frompo 10y ago
    What? For irc you can connect without an account, how is that harder than forcing people to register on github first? Oh, you mean its easier for people who already have github account? Who are these people that create accounts on a hosting service for one of the more complicated version control systems but find connecting to ftp servers and entering cli commands too daunting? If you want to talk about confusing, in gitter I can navigate to a room and see what happens in it but I need to press an extra button to actually be able to talk in it? What? Rooms, private chats and /me? Many parts of gitter doesn't make sense if you don't know the whole chat paradigm that irc created. Gitter derives it utility purely in the better web client and its custom built integration with github.

kinkdr 10y ago

ICQ actually predates AIM

stormbrew 10y ago
It doesn't say it didn't (that I can see). I think it's saying AIM brought the concept into the mainstream, and I think that's probably more or less true in the US. Interestingly (to me, at least), this seemed to be pretty reasonable. No one I knew in Canada had AIM, except if they talked to Americans regularly. MSNM was very very popular, though. And ICQ before it.
- Frompo 10y ago
  Yeah, you needed aim if you wanted to chat with some americans when I played utopia. Meanwhile the big IM breakthrough among my less technical friends was msn. I quite quickly found a stand along multi-protocol client and I've stuck to that mode of managing IM since when I could control it.
- stormbrew 10y ago
  Reasonable should be regional. Noticed after the edit window, damnit.

chickenbane 10y ago

I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo. I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously, it's also simultaneously terrifying. Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.

Nullabillity 10y ago
> On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. I don't get this. Just because you're using a device that has historically been tied to a specific method of identification doesn't mean that you have to limit yourself to that? Should desktop chat clients start only identifying people by IP addresses?
- detaro 10y ago
  Indeed. Nearly all phone-number-as-identity services fail at allowing multiple clients (Whatsapp and Signal have at least something, but not perfect either), which is probably the biggest issue I have with newer messengers. And it makes changing my phone number more annoying, for IMHO no good reason. Allow people to configure their phone number for discovery if they want, but don't make it the primary identifier.
- Jordrok 10y ago
  +1 to this. I have never wanted to bind my identity to my phone number and never will. This is an anti-feature to me.
10y ago

mmastrac 10y ago

We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji. When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit. I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.

zatkin 10y ago
My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.
- bazqux2 10y ago
  XMPP is a poor protocol. I can completely understand why they would want to break compatibility.
  - Bromskloss 10y ago
    Is there anything particular about XMPP that is poor?
inopinatus 10y ago
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.
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Features that existed in GChat but didn't map well to XMPP were harder to implement. 4. The XMPP protocol sucked on mobile and sucked in web clients, and therefore Google's own clients were not using it any more. New extensions like Jingle were more like entirely separate protocols than small upgrades. Federated chat protocols are the sort of thing that intuitively sound nice, but networks that implement them inevitably end up being killed off by closed, proprietary competitors that are simply a whole lot better. Email hangs on, kinda, but I passively await the day that the email system is killed off by a closed network. It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. Moxie Marlinspike has written some thoughts on why federated protocols are yesterday's solution here: https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value.

andersonmvd 10y ago

I may be a resistant one, but I prefer and still use gtalk/gchat/hangouts over slack or any other tool. Slack requires either another tab, a new mobile app or a desktop app, which isn't that great when switching between organisations. At least on my Ubuntu Linux. Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored. If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple, that would be great IMHO.

ronnier 10y ago

To this day, ICQ is still the best messenger I've used.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MildlySerious 10y ago
May I ask what made it the best messenger for you? I hated every second I spent on ICQ. The ad-infested client, the fact that if someone else thought 24px purple comic-sans was their identity, I would have to deal with it.. The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an Emoji it was converted back to its text version.
- ronnier 10y ago
  I mean pre-ad days.

pkaeding 10y ago

> 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.

tizzdogg 10y ago
Yeah I still use it daily, and now I'm worried it's going away. I wonder how many holdouts there are out there?
- prutschman 10y ago
  I rely extensively on Gchat via Adium.

pkaeding 10y ago

jalami 10y ago

The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems to be centralize everything. I think it's because centralized systems are easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it? Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it. I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start demanding DRM-FREE social relationships. Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede control of all facets of your business to third-parties".

Frompo 10y ago
Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working well in my desktop client :(
- duskwuff 10y ago
  > Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. And critically: that standard needs to not be XMPP. It's a mess of a protocol that's difficult to implement, and which fails to adequately support many common use cases (e.g, mobile clients, file transfer, and group chats).

nipponese 10y ago

Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.

aerovistae 10y ago
Did you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs? The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays), and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded all of them by many years. I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the article. I can still dream. It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was 2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly impressive failure.

ec109685 10y ago

Slack nailed it with the notion of teams. You invite someone into a team and there's an instant tachonomy of conversation to join. The ability to be in multiple teams at once is hugely helpful as well.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Tachonomy isn't the word you meant to use there. In fact, it's not a word. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tachonomy http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tachonomy
- SNACKeR99 10y ago
  http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Taxonomy http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Taxonomy
swrobel 10y ago
Yes but each requires its own username/password combo!
- spronkey 10y ago
  This. Hideous and awful.
  - jhgg 10y ago
    Check out https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/

tbrock 10y ago

No, they are different. One feels like IM and the other feels like IRC.

nnain 10y ago

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 loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat. In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down. GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.

drumdance 10y ago
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.
- nnain 10y ago
  Yeah, Wave created quite a buzz, at least within developers/early-adopters. It was complicated and heavy though. I didn't get fond of its features, for the few weeks that it existed.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I still click that button regularly. The "Google Talk" Gmail plugin still works better than the "Google Hangouts" one.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

draw_down 10y ago

Right, they couldn't let it be its own thing. It always had to be under the umbrella of some other thing that nobody actually wanted. It's one thing to make something nobody likes, it's quite another to make something very popular and then drown it in social-sauce till its users don't want anything to do with it anymore.

rekoros 10y ago

Oh wow, we'll be adding three more services to this -- https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf No words.

aftbit 10y ago

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/ 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.

amq 10y ago
https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat
- ronreiter 10y ago
  Rocket chat is awesome. It even has giphy integration!
reactor 10y ago
http://www.mattermost.org/ http://www.mattermost.org/ is doing it
- 50CNT 10y ago
  Yup, been looking into it the last couple of days because Slack is devilishly slow in China, and it seems to cover most of the stuff you'd want from slack plus the things GP mentioned. Really cool stuff.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- fredrik-j 10y ago

Perceptes 10y ago

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it enter people's consciousness as one of the most serious contenders for messaging systems. Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client (https://vector.im/ https://vector.im/). You can connect to the public server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec and the system are more promising than anything else out there today. If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my project, Ruma (https://www.ruma.io/ https://www.ruma.io/), which is a Rust implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.

amelius 10y ago
Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?
- cpach 10y ago
  Moxie Marlinspike recently published an interesting essay that adressed this question. ”XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a ’living standard.’ Despite its capacity for protocol ’extensions,’ however, it's undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can't realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven't those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world? Like any federated protocol, extensions don't mean much unless everyone applies them, and that's an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren't consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone's choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn't support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn't only effect them, it effects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.” https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

stevewillows 10y ago

gchat was great. I really wish Google build on Hangouts to integrate SMS like iMessage. Having a proper desktop SMS client is the only reason I ended up going back to IOS a few months ago. I can understand why they dropped XMPP. I'm not sure if they really violated their 'don't be evil' motto as much as they recognized that other services were improving on their dime. I like Slack for corporate environments, but IRC is still top dog when it comes to interest-based real-time communities.

grahamburger 10y ago
If you use Google Voice the sms (and voice) integration is very seamless.
- stevewillows 10y ago
  I should have mentioned that I'm in the neglected nation of the north. I do have a google voice number that was grandfathered in from Grand Central, but the GV number is in Seattle.
insane_dreamer 10y ago
I think Slack works best for closed project workgroups, whereas IRC is best for open and persistent communities.

homero 10y ago

I miss it

fh973 10y ago

I wonder why they never added drag and drop file transfer. If you understand it as a presence concept and not just "chat" I think this is a must.

frik 10y ago

IRC, XMPP, WebRTC, WebSocket and AJAX. Almost all common chat clients are based on one of these technologies. The most straight forward protocol to implement is certainly IRC. It works very well for group chats and is used by many open source projects and in house usage. FBchat and Gchat are based on a slightly non-standard XMPP, at least started from that point and turned less and less open. Maybe I am a forerunner, I used chat a lot more several years ago, and nowadays write a lot more (short) emails or just talk in person (or over VoIP with video). On the other side, we will chat/talk a lot with our personal software assistent in future.

dclowd9901 10y ago

Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts. It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform. No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.

jonathankoren 10y ago
Keeping a separate work account is easy. Just create one. I don't understand why people just don't do this more often.
icebraining 10y ago
Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts. What about Google Apps for Work? It's been around for a decade.

partycoder 10y ago

IRC was the future of messaging but until Slack came up with a different experience, people didn't know.

wodenokoto 10y ago

I remember Gchat as a constant struggle to try and turn off unwanted functionality in Gmail. I also remember Gchat as being one of a a number of a number of instant messaging options from Google that had very unclear market position and operability (I honestly didn't know that gChat was talking with Google Talk, I thought those where different) At least now, it is only Hangouts I can't log out of, and at least it doesn't show up in gmail.

andrewvijay 10y ago

I got my first girl friend, mini project approval in college and many more from that gtalk. I was devastated to know it was discontinued. They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Which would have been a good effort. Companies work so hard to create brand value in their products but Google unintentionally creates value and destroys them later on. Phew.

icebraining 10y ago
They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Then a lot of people would be claiming Google was being dishonest and tricking its users.

est 10y ago

> Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know Google nows that, but improvements upon Gchat is not best fit for OKRs and Googler's future resumes. Why not invent another wheel so you can show off next GoogleIO?

reuven 10y ago

When Slack first came out, and everyone got all excited about it, I was quite skeptical. I've been using Skype (and lots of other IM systems) for years; do I really want or need something new? The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop, in my browser, and on my phone. So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did it do the right things in a narrow technical sense? Absolutely. But without the slick, inviting, easy-to-use UI, it wasn't going to go anywhere. And now that Slack has critical mass, it's hard to imagine Google catching up.

nly 10y ago
Ultimately slack is just a proprietary IRC, with a solution for message persistence falling out its centralized design. IRCCloud and ZNC both solve the same problem. Its slick as hell, but still a walled garden.
- reuven 10y ago
  Yes, this is my greatest regret and problem with Slack: Someone could have made amazing IRC clients (and servers), and kept it open to the world. It's a shame that a solved problem with open-source tools has been turned into a billion-dollar proprietary company.

lewisjoe 10y ago

A really big fan of Gchat here. What I was amazed at in the software was, how reliably it worked no matter how less your internet bandwidth is. The desktop GTalk app was tiny, handy and powerful. Back when I couldn't afford a wired internet connection in my home, I used to bridge my phone's 2G data to my computer and when nothing else worked with that tiny bandwidth, GTalk did. Hangouts - is just sad. It loads visibly delayed. Every conversation you click at, again takes milliseconds/seconds to load. Never had this cognitive delay in GTalk. I miss it.

inputmice 10y ago

Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations (https://Conversations.im https://Conversations.im) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…

y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
conversations is really nice. thanks for making it. one problem i have with it, that gchat solves really well, is how it behaves when you have a desktop client and conversations open at the same time. when someone using conversations writes to me, what i expect is that i get the message on my desktop, as well as on my mobile client. but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message, if on my phone or on my desktop client. this should not happen. it should just send it without the resource set, and let the xmpp server figure it out.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  > but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message Must be a bug (or OTR requirement, as OTR doesn't work with multiple devices). XMPP clients shouldn't require sender to choose the recipient's resource, unless sender is explicit that they want to target a specific device.
- inputmice 10y ago
  This is a confinement of OTR. OTR was never made for modern day instant messaging. Use OMEMO or send unencrypted messages and you won't have this problem.
Arathorn 10y ago
inputmice: I hear your Conversations app is really nice, and it's great to see XMPP is evolving well. Rather than being defensive about XMPP and badmouthing matrix, perhaps we can just bridge both ecosystems and both sides and clients benefit from wider reach? Especially when some tech like interoperable E2E ratchet implementations is of direct use for both ecosystems. The two protocols have entirely different designs and philosophies and do different things. It's like claiming that NNTP competes with SMTP because you can uses them both to hold conversations. Please can we both just get along? :) In terms of matrix's usability: i'd say it's been very usable for the last 6 months or so - and given the size and activity visible to the matrix.org homeserver, others seem to concur.

sametmax 10y ago

We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble, works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one: emails. You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.

tehrei 10y ago
E-mails take an eternity to send and receive compared to IM.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Kinda. But much as I've appreciated it, for 30+ years now, SMTP is old and in the way. Something secure, flexible, workable, and open needs to replace it.
SNACKeR99 10y ago
SMTP is a store and forward protocol that in no way provides real time chat speeds. It is designed to be robust, not fast.
gkop 10y ago
Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Text messages are very slow, and nobody minds. People on iMessage don't see the difference. It's more a metter of perception. When you click on a mail, it takes a lot of time to type, then your UI have a delay to say it's sent, then you have this time taken by many clients to move your mail to the proper folder. But a proper mail-chat client would just make the message appear as sent, then to all the stuff in background, and you would just not see it slower than other chat. The time people take to answer you message is usually the bottleneck, not the network.
  - 10y ago

geniium 10y ago

Sorry, what's the purpose of this post? Really? Come on spend some real time with your family and friends and stop writing useless post like this one. Yeah your right : and people writing on walls in Stone Age were the precursors of Facebook! Damn.

erikb 10y ago

GChat was painful to use. IRC and Jabber are the predecessors.

giancarlostoro 10y ago
Google Talk was based on Jabber, so you could log in to it via any Jabber / XMPP client.

bakhy 10y ago

Hangouts was horrible to me for just one reason - on the smartphone, it hid info on who is online right now.. perhaps this was designed to motivate us to send more messages, but it meant i could no longer easily know if someone might answer now, or if i better try sms/call/.. and then as of recently, Hangouts just fails to notify me of messages, or keeps re-notifying me of old ones, and now i barely use it any more. Google+ had a similar design decision, when it showed (don't know if this changed) friend suggestions without indicating if those people actually use Google+, or if your adding them to a circle will just spam them to join a social network they don't (want to) use. it's understandable that Google might want to do these things to grow their platforms, but without tact and understanding for what the users really want, they're achieving the opposite.

curt15 10y ago
At least now they've sort of restored the online presence indicators with the "last seen XXX ago", but I still don't understand what can be so hard about searching hangouts conversations on the phone. I can search through emails and through SMS. Why not hangouts?

ronreiter 10y ago

I made a mock that could explain how Google can still compete with Slack today. What do you think? https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?... (If there's anyone from Google here that likes the idea then drop me a line at ron.reiter@gmail.com)

wnevets 10y ago

The gchat UI was so much better than everything else out today. So simple and yet still very useful.

antoniuschan99 10y ago

I spent two years of my life focusing on chat and I think it's matured to the point of oversaturation in todays market. Chat itself should now be viewed as a commodity, it's the features that's built on top of it that will differentiate one platform over the other. Enterprise chat used to be a differentiator, but everyones doing that now too. I think document sharing (Dropbox, Google Drive) and chat are basically in the same place right now in that both have been democratized and both have an over saturation of similar services.