11 ms·

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

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 lightweight chat app, right in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the time! Google has failed to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones? So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and they used their Android market share to do that. People didn't like it, still used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because everybody's gotta reinvent the wheel. You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything. Who's making these decisions exactly? Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it's honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord (https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/) for essentially all my communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms tech, even as an open protocol). It's proprietary, but at least it gives me text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn't suck - and there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.

munin 10y ago
Don't forget Allo in the mix, from Google, that could replace Hangouts! Take a product people use, and replace it with something people don't, then replace that with something that people also don't use.
- Crespyl 10y ago
  I tried Allo once, which was enough. It was actually fascinating, because it was among the most viscerally negative reactions I've ever had to a piece of software. It reminded me of that trick where you play back someone's speech to them in a very slight delay and it becomes very difficult for them to speak, only in this case with my inner monologue while trying to participate in a conversation. Really impressively disturbing and uncomfortable. An amazing feat, but not something I will ever use.
- krzyk 10y ago
  Isn't Allo video only? Hangouts is first-text, with optional video.
  - anchpop 10y ago
    Duo is video-only. Allo is text-only
shmerl 10y ago
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 incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever. And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose. People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  ...and people switched to slack.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - wykydtron 10y ago
    After Gtalk was killed in Google Apps, everyone in my company switch to Slack. Hangouts is a botched POS. None of us want to use video.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  If ever there was a software example of killing the goose with the golden eggs. Imagine if they thought like that about email?
  - ungzd 10y ago
    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.
wykydtron 10y ago
Another example is iMessage which is very popular amongst the Apple fans. And Snapchat essentially is another great mobile to mobile coms app people don't quite get yet, but it's more powerful and entertaining than "Hangouts"
cwyers 10y ago
> But at least now it works on phones? This is actually really, really important to people.
- chrisper 10y ago
  You are saying it like if XMPP never worked on phones.
  - comex 10y ago
    It didn't work well. 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.
    - 10y ago
smdz 10y ago
This has got me thinking... If the same GTalk was available on mobile, would I have installed WhatsApp?
draw_down 10y ago
So, what you don't get is why using an open chat protocol didn't turn into market leadership? Or...
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Google's failure to turn Talk into a market leader has absolutely nothing to do with Talk being built on top of an open source protocol.
Spooky23 10y ago
Everything has consolidated, so it's all about walling off users to increase friction between the Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple universes.
- wykydtron 10y ago
  My gf gave in and bought an iPhone 7. I haven't owned an iPhone since 2009.... iMessage is pretty neat... But still, I'm sticking with Android.
- pokemongoaway 10y ago
  Yep, and I wish a bunch of HNers with lots of time would spin up an OSS Google Apps (for most of the apps at least) replacement. Then people could do one-click installs on AWS or their own infrastructure, and the like...
giancarlostoro 10y ago
Sadly Facebook also used to do XMPP which is annoying as well. Used to be you could login to either one from any XMPP client, this means Pidgin, which most people used to use for MSN Messenger, which I miss so much when I think of what has happened to Skype. Even though MSN Messenger had it's own weird flaws (like locking people out of their own accounts because people would force login attempts to force lock your account so you couldn't login anymore). Now Skype lets anyone grab your IP and pull it into a booter. The gaming community is full of skids. I absolutely agree with you though, Discord is one product done right, runs everywhere, and everyone I ask to "join my discord" I can't even get rid of them once they're on it, and if I stop going on they nag at me. I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  > I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done. I want to highlight that this is not realistically possible for anyone, not right now anyway. When Discord was created, XMPP was the only option if you wanted to adopt an open standard, and it was absolutely not up to the task. Matrix was also an option but far too new. Discord is a startup, and is run as a business (just like Slack). If you were at the head of a startup in the messaging space, and there were no reasonable open source options for messaging, you'd design your own. This is a hard process; making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom. I used to say (even here on HN) that Google was our best hope at creating a modern open source messaging protocol, by improving Hangouts and making it open. They have utterly failed. I am confident Discord is our next best hope... assuming they succeed. Otherwise, it's back to waiting for Matrix to finish playing catchup.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom // Can you expand on that. Are Discord using someone else's closed protocol then in preference to their own (which they could open) or an already open one? Or did you mean "freedom" as in "ability to use lock-in", or something else?
TheRealPomax 10y ago
fun fact, ICQ is doing just fine. They just stopped bothering staying in the English speaking game, it's now mostly a Russian thing. Doing quite well, still under active support and development.
- homakov 10y ago
  "Advanced" runet users dropped ICQ for telegram long time ago
1_2__3 10y ago
Honestly, what I think we're seeing is evidence of an existential crisis in some quarters in Google. There's a lot of people who still believe in "do no evil" and who furthermore believe that part and parcel of that is not building walled gardens. Then you have other people - including Larry - who think walled gardens are the only solution. The PM for RTC at Google wrote a long email about how basically interoperability is dead, XMPP is dead, federation is dead, and every attempt by Google to build open standards has been effectively exploited by competitors. So a lot of influential management thinks going full FB is the way to go. But a lot of other people at Google think open standards are still the way of the future, or can be if a company like Google is willing to champion them. The result of all of this is a complete and utter dumpster fire from a product perspective. It's the classic "if we're not pulling together then we're rowing against each other" problem. I think Google would be able to execute just fine if they could settle on what they want to achieve. Instead we have this.
nickbauman 10y ago
> You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. XMPP is weird, true; it relies on opening an XML document and sending fragments of XML for the duration of the session and only closing the document at session completion. Very odd. But it performs extremely well. And once you get your head wrapped around the constraints, it's not so bad.
pvg 10y ago
Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. By the time google talk came around, third party clients were easily connecting to all the other major IM services. I don't think the open protocol made any difference to its popularity.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. It would have been much harder for Google to bootstrap at the time, if they hadn't been able to just point people to existing clients that supported XMPP. Third party clients made Talk useful faster (thus popularizing it). Sure, several of the third party clients were pretty good at reverse engineering weird protocols while also supporting open ones, but there's no guarantee they would have bothered with Talk, especially if Talk existed only in a web browser.
  - pvg 10y ago
    Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. Didn't it? I think it had a client from the get go https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_form https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_fo...
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      Interesting, I seem to recall an entirely different order of release. Blame it on personal bias (was already using XMPP at the time of Talk's release) and/or aging memory, I suppose.
      - pvg 10y ago
        I remembered it exactly the other way round and also wasn't sure. It's curious/disturbing that events barely over a decade past are difficult to google. 'What was the first gtalk client'. 'When was gtalk integrated into gmail'. 'When did gtalk get an OS X client'.
MaxLeiter 10y ago
Regarding IRC, how do you feel about ircv3 [1]? [1] http://ircv3.org http://ircv3.org
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I have been following it closely but it feels like too little, too late. IRC is just not the protocol of the future. There's far higher chances for Matrix to become popular or discord to be open sourced.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Are there any IRCv3 implementations? Is freenode planning on running it? I'd love a totally OSS alternative to Slack. Maybe we'll see it with the recent Gitter acquisition?
  - uvatbc 10y ago
    Rocket Chat (https://github.com/RocketChat https://github.com/RocketChat) is a totally OSS Slack alternative.
  - MaxLeiter 10y ago
    Many popular ircd's support different IRCv3 specs. Freenode, Rizon, etc all support different specs/capabilities. You can see a list here: http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html (Warning: bias/plug; I contribute to Lounge) In terms of OSS alternative to slack, I recommend you check out Lounge, a self-hosted JavaScript web client (think: selfhosted IRC version of Slack, minus/plus a few features) https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge
    - tnone 10y ago
      Slack, minus the ability to gracefully run in any sort of long term roaming context without babysitting. There's no decent reconnecting logic on either client or server, you just have to notice it's gone quiet, and then figure out the undocumented way to restore it without nuking your settings. Only figured out by accident "/connect" without parameters is valid. I tried to fix it, but the client is a pile of terrible code and needs a complete rewrite.
vvanders 10y ago
Huge fan of Matrix, really hope it takes off. They've got the right idea and it plugs into other things like IRC very cleanly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
superioritycplx 10y ago
Google has ADHD and too much money for own good.
niftich 10y ago
I don't disagree with your points but your timeline fudges the timescale quite a bit. I've researched this [1]. Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email. To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and won messaging handily; its lead was cemented by the acquisition of WhatsApp on 2014-02-19, as Google continued to flail about. In a post of mine last year [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518
dandelion_lover 10y ago
> there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it. https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ works just in the browser. What's the problem?
NeverTrump 10y ago
I will answer what you don't get. Just because you use Google's stuff all around doesn't mean Google were "one of the only players...." Google was a distant third in IM behind MS and Yahoo. I've never seen a Zebra doesn't mean the Zebra doesn't exist.
eigenvector 10y ago
> So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones? Talk had a full-featured native phone app way back in Android 2.1 with multiple device support, which Allo still doesn't have today. I used it religiously on my Nexus One.
isaiahg 10y ago
With that said, despite being a poor product I rely on Hangouts daily because I can make free WiFi calls with Voice. I can't afford cell service and it lets me stay connected to my family.
gcb0 10y ago
everyone get and will get IM wrong. communication is taboo for ads. and nothing on the Internet can have a fee. see the incompatibility? Facebook is spending on IM because it bought the first IM that dissociated itself from the Internet. every whatsapp user see it as a sms and phone company alternative. everyone else that live by ads (Google, yahoo, etc) will try their hand at IM, realize they can't use it for ads or ad targeting, and will scratch it.
bigbugbag 10y ago
I don't understand what you don't get, this is how google works. Google does things like that constantly: buying popular softwares to kill them, make services such as google reader and kill them, etc. Google has its own agenda and making an open and distributed internet that respect people privacy or wishes is not part of it.

munin 10y ago

Don't forget Allo in the mix, from Google, that could replace Hangouts! Take a product people use, and replace it with something people don't, then replace that with something that people also don't use.

Crespyl 10y ago
I tried Allo once, which was enough. It was actually fascinating, because it was among the most viscerally negative reactions I've ever had to a piece of software. It reminded me of that trick where you play back someone's speech to them in a very slight delay and it becomes very difficult for them to speak, only in this case with my inner monologue while trying to participate in a conversation. Really impressively disturbing and uncomfortable. An amazing feat, but not something I will ever use.
krzyk 10y ago
Isn't Allo video only? Hangouts is first-text, with optional video.
- anchpop 10y ago
  Duo is video-only. Allo is text-only

shmerl 10y ago

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 incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever. And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose. People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.

throwaway91111 10y ago
...and people switched to slack.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wykydtron 10y ago
  After Gtalk was killed in Google Apps, everyone in my company switch to Slack. Hangouts is a botched POS. None of us want to use video.
scrollaway 10y ago
If ever there was a software example of killing the goose with the golden eggs. Imagine if they thought like that about email?
- ungzd 10y ago
  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.

wykydtron 10y ago

Another example is iMessage which is very popular amongst the Apple fans. And Snapchat essentially is another great mobile to mobile coms app people don't quite get yet, but it's more powerful and entertaining than "Hangouts"

cwyers 10y ago

> But at least now it works on phones? This is actually really, really important to people.

chrisper 10y ago
You are saying it like if XMPP never worked on phones.
- comex 10y ago
  It didn't work well. 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.
  - 10y ago

smdz 10y ago

This has got me thinking... If the same GTalk was available on mobile, would I have installed WhatsApp?

draw_down 10y ago

So, what you don't get is why using an open chat protocol didn't turn into market leadership? Or...

scrollaway 10y ago
Google's failure to turn Talk into a market leader has absolutely nothing to do with Talk being built on top of an open source protocol.

Spooky23 10y ago

Everything has consolidated, so it's all about walling off users to increase friction between the Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple universes.

wykydtron 10y ago
My gf gave in and bought an iPhone 7. I haven't owned an iPhone since 2009.... iMessage is pretty neat... But still, I'm sticking with Android.
pokemongoaway 10y ago
Yep, and I wish a bunch of HNers with lots of time would spin up an OSS Google Apps (for most of the apps at least) replacement. Then people could do one-click installs on AWS or their own infrastructure, and the like...

giancarlostoro 10y ago

Sadly Facebook also used to do XMPP which is annoying as well. Used to be you could login to either one from any XMPP client, this means Pidgin, which most people used to use for MSN Messenger, which I miss so much when I think of what has happened to Skype. Even though MSN Messenger had it's own weird flaws (like locking people out of their own accounts because people would force login attempts to force lock your account so you couldn't login anymore). Now Skype lets anyone grab your IP and pull it into a booter. The gaming community is full of skids. I absolutely agree with you though, Discord is one product done right, runs everywhere, and everyone I ask to "join my discord" I can't even get rid of them once they're on it, and if I stop going on they nag at me. I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done.

scrollaway 10y ago
> I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done. I want to highlight that this is not realistically possible for anyone, not right now anyway. When Discord was created, XMPP was the only option if you wanted to adopt an open standard, and it was absolutely not up to the task. Matrix was also an option but far too new. Discord is a startup, and is run as a business (just like Slack). If you were at the head of a startup in the messaging space, and there were no reasonable open source options for messaging, you'd design your own. This is a hard process; making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom. I used to say (even here on HN) that Google was our best hope at creating a modern open source messaging protocol, by improving Hangouts and making it open. They have utterly failed. I am confident Discord is our next best hope... assuming they succeed. Otherwise, it's back to waiting for Matrix to finish playing catchup.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom // Can you expand on that. Are Discord using someone else's closed protocol then in preference to their own (which they could open) or an already open one? Or did you mean "freedom" as in "ability to use lock-in", or something else?

TheRealPomax 10y ago

fun fact, ICQ is doing just fine. They just stopped bothering staying in the English speaking game, it's now mostly a Russian thing. Doing quite well, still under active support and development.

homakov 10y ago
"Advanced" runet users dropped ICQ for telegram long time ago

1_2__3 10y ago

Honestly, what I think we're seeing is evidence of an existential crisis in some quarters in Google. There's a lot of people who still believe in "do no evil" and who furthermore believe that part and parcel of that is not building walled gardens. Then you have other people - including Larry - who think walled gardens are the only solution. The PM for RTC at Google wrote a long email about how basically interoperability is dead, XMPP is dead, federation is dead, and every attempt by Google to build open standards has been effectively exploited by competitors. So a lot of influential management thinks going full FB is the way to go. But a lot of other people at Google think open standards are still the way of the future, or can be if a company like Google is willing to champion them. The result of all of this is a complete and utter dumpster fire from a product perspective. It's the classic "if we're not pulling together then we're rowing against each other" problem. I think Google would be able to execute just fine if they could settle on what they want to achieve. Instead we have this.

nickbauman 10y ago

> You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. XMPP is weird, true; it relies on opening an XML document and sending fragments of XML for the duration of the session and only closing the document at session completion. Very odd. But it performs extremely well. And once you get your head wrapped around the constraints, it's not so bad.

pvg 10y ago

Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. By the time google talk came around, third party clients were easily connecting to all the other major IM services. I don't think the open protocol made any difference to its popularity.

WorldMaker 10y ago
Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. It would have been much harder for Google to bootstrap at the time, if they hadn't been able to just point people to existing clients that supported XMPP. Third party clients made Talk useful faster (thus popularizing it). Sure, several of the third party clients were pretty good at reverse engineering weird protocols while also supporting open ones, but there's no guarantee they would have bothered with Talk, especially if Talk existed only in a web browser.
- pvg 10y ago
  Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. Didn't it? I think it had a client from the get go https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_form https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_Talk_released_in_beta_fo...
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    Interesting, I seem to recall an entirely different order of release. Blame it on personal bias (was already using XMPP at the time of Talk's release) and/or aging memory, I suppose.
    - pvg 10y ago
      I remembered it exactly the other way round and also wasn't sure. It's curious/disturbing that events barely over a decade past are difficult to google. 'What was the first gtalk client'. 'When was gtalk integrated into gmail'. 'When did gtalk get an OS X client'.

MaxLeiter 10y ago

Regarding IRC, how do you feel about ircv3 [1]? [1] http://ircv3.org http://ircv3.org

scrollaway 10y ago
I have been following it closely but it feels like too little, too late. IRC is just not the protocol of the future. There's far higher chances for Matrix to become popular or discord to be open sourced.
djsumdog 10y ago
Are there any IRCv3 implementations? Is freenode planning on running it? I'd love a totally OSS alternative to Slack. Maybe we'll see it with the recent Gitter acquisition?
- uvatbc 10y ago
  Rocket Chat (https://github.com/RocketChat https://github.com/RocketChat) is a totally OSS Slack alternative.
- MaxLeiter 10y ago
  Many popular ircd's support different IRCv3 specs. Freenode, Rizon, etc all support different specs/capabilities. You can see a list here: http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html (Warning: bias/plug; I contribute to Lounge) In terms of OSS alternative to slack, I recommend you check out Lounge, a self-hosted JavaScript web client (think: selfhosted IRC version of Slack, minus/plus a few features) https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge
  - tnone 10y ago
    Slack, minus the ability to gracefully run in any sort of long term roaming context without babysitting. There's no decent reconnecting logic on either client or server, you just have to notice it's gone quiet, and then figure out the undocumented way to restore it without nuking your settings. Only figured out by accident "/connect" without parameters is valid. I tried to fix it, but the client is a pile of terrible code and needs a complete rewrite.

vvanders 10y ago

Huge fan of Matrix, really hope it takes off. They've got the right idea and it plugs into other things like IRC very cleanly.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

superioritycplx 10y ago

Google has ADHD and too much money for own good.

niftich 10y ago

I don't disagree with your points but your timeline fudges the timescale quite a bit. I've researched this [1]. Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email. To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and won messaging handily; its lead was cemented by the acquisition of WhatsApp on 2014-02-19, as Google continued to flail about. In a post of mine last year [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

dandelion_lover 10y ago

> there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it. https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ works just in the browser. What's the problem?

NeverTrump 10y ago

I will answer what you don't get. Just because you use Google's stuff all around doesn't mean Google were "one of the only players...." Google was a distant third in IM behind MS and Yahoo. I've never seen a Zebra doesn't mean the Zebra doesn't exist.

eigenvector 10y ago

> So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones? Talk had a full-featured native phone app way back in Android 2.1 with multiple device support, which Allo still doesn't have today. I used it religiously on my Nexus One.

isaiahg 10y ago

With that said, despite being a poor product I rely on Hangouts daily because I can make free WiFi calls with Voice. I can't afford cell service and it lets me stay connected to my family.

gcb0 10y ago

everyone get and will get IM wrong. communication is taboo for ads. and nothing on the Internet can have a fee. see the incompatibility? Facebook is spending on IM because it bought the first IM that dissociated itself from the Internet. every whatsapp user see it as a sms and phone company alternative. everyone else that live by ads (Google, yahoo, etc) will try their hand at IM, realize they can't use it for ads or ad targeting, and will scratch it.

bigbugbag 10y ago

I don't understand what you don't get, this is how google works. Google does things like that constantly: buying popular softwares to kill them, make services such as google reader and kill them, etc. Google has its own agenda and making an open and distributed internet that respect people privacy or wishes is not part of it.