5 ms·

I am honestly wondering if there is an inside joke for tech companies attempting to make the worst possible messaging app. Facebook messenger is god awful ugly

I am honestly wondering if there is an inside joke for tech companies attempting to make the worst possible messaging app. Facebook messenger is god awful ugly, same with snapchat. Google Hangouts is ok at best (I personally have not used Google's other dozen or so messaging apps they have)

cm2187 9y ago
....and Microsoft' stellar success with Skype
smcl 9y ago
GChat used to be great - it was simple, relatively lightweight and quick. Then it was rebranded Hangouts and became a little muddled and unwieldy for a brief period when Whatsapp was ascendent which nearly overnight caused my entire group of friends to switch. You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates
- debaserab2 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but what? I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs. What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...). Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have no recourse because everything is locked-down proprietary bullshit, even though most of the messages are plain text and could have been delivered just fine by open protocols in 1990. Not to mention these apps are all poorly designed resource hogs that spy on everyone, inject ugly ads, and burn mobile battery.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      Proprietary push notifications on mobile devices are what really killed open IM protocols. What good is an open protocol, if the client app can't wake up to process it without a proprietary channel? We need to fix that mess first, somehow.
  - smcl 9y ago
    Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today. 1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ... 2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface. 3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts. Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
  - mbillie1 9y ago
    It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it. I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  The desktop client was all I ever wanted in a chat app. Simple, fast, reliable. Which of course is why they killed it.
billysielu 9y ago
Competition. It's just like advertising. The more your competitors advertise the more you feel you have to. Notifications from people are fine, e.g. 'x messaged you'. Notifications from machines are the problem, e.g. 'x just did y'.

cm2187 9y ago

....and Microsoft' stellar success with Skype

smcl 9y ago

GChat used to be great - it was simple, relatively lightweight and quick. Then it was rebranded Hangouts and became a little muddled and unwieldy for a brief period when Whatsapp was ascendent which nearly overnight caused my entire group of friends to switch. You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates

debaserab2 9y ago
I'm sorry, but what? I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs. What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?
- jacobolus 9y ago
  I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...). Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have no recourse because everything is locked-down proprietary bullshit, even though most of the messages are plain text and could have been delivered just fine by open protocols in 1990. Not to mention these apps are all poorly designed resource hogs that spy on everyone, inject ugly ads, and burn mobile battery.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    Proprietary push notifications on mobile devices are what really killed open IM protocols. What good is an open protocol, if the client app can't wake up to process it without a proprietary channel? We need to fix that mess first, somehow.
- smcl 9y ago
  Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today. 1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ... 2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface. 3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts. Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
- mbillie1 9y ago
  It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it. I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
nebabyte 9y ago
The desktop client was all I ever wanted in a chat app. Simple, fast, reliable. Which of course is why they killed it.

billysielu 9y ago

Competition. It's just like advertising. The more your competitors advertise the more you feel you have to. Notifications from people are fine, e.g. 'x messaged you'. Notifications from machines are the problem, e.g. 'x just did y'.