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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

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.
Yhippa 10y ago
> 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. I've started using the Skype Summarize bot in the Outlook website and it's pretty cool. Rather than going to a separate site and deal with subpar UI/UX you just paste the article URL in and you get your summary via the chat window. I was skeptical of all of Google's messaging platforms but if they can come close to providing me this functionality I'm on board. Getting things done via bots vs going to a website IMO is the future.

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.

Yhippa 10y ago

> 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. I've started using the Skype Summarize bot in the Outlook website and it's pretty cool. Rather than going to a separate site and deal with subpar UI/UX you just paste the article URL in and you get your summary via the chat window. I was skeptical of all of Google's messaging platforms but if they can come close to providing me this functionality I'm on board. Getting things done via bots vs going to a website IMO is the future.