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Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were addi

Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features). I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. == * this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts

rident 9y ago
Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint. They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.
- shliachtx 9y ago
  Apparently they were built to mimic IRC but don't actually use it under the hood. But like you mentioned, they DO have some integration with IRC.
- pr3dr49 9y ago
  You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Yeah, the GitLab omnibus package comes with MatterMost bundled. It's a really nice solution for self-hosted chat.
  - rident 9y ago
    Matrix [1], mentioned elsewhere in these comments, looks interesting too and the Riot [2] app is similarly styled to Slack. [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2] https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org
    - Spoom 9y ago
      Matrix is basically open source Slack. It fixes a lot of the problems that IRC had, enabling continuous presence, central authentication, easy file transfer, bot integrations, and more. I really hope it catches on more. Disclaimer: I help run a small Matrix network.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  > They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client. As for the XMPP gateway it's just barely usable. From my personal experience it even tended to drop messages from time to time. It seems Slack added it just to claim XMPP compatibility. Just look at where is Slack placed in this ranking https://conversations.im/compliance/ https://conversations.im/compliance/
jrockway 9y ago
> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation. As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine. My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No. For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app". I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord: https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW
- commandar 9y ago
  >Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. Mircrosoft's current stab at this is called Teams. I think it actually has potential: it's pretty much a clone of Slack, except that MS is willing to declare it compliant with, e.g., HIPAA.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Teams is a cross between Slack and Facebook. It has channels, but also a threaded-messages structure that is just painful. Everybody in the company I work for wants to like it, but they struggle. Slack would be so much better, but then we’d lose Sharepoint and AD integration and we’d have Yet Another Silo We Have To Pay For.
  - dorgo 9y ago
Semaphor 9y ago
> Skype for Business Which has a horrible UX. Personally, I use trillian to connect to facebook, jabber and others. But FB is always working hard to make that integration as bad as possible.
luka-birsa 9y ago
There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough. How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group.... Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
    - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
      The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties. Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.
      - dmytroi 9y ago
        Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se https://hitta.se
jasikpark 9y ago
Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.
- donbindner 9y ago
  Try to go back and delete old conversations.... Discord really falls down there.
  - asherdavidson 9y ago
    They have decent search at least. Lots of filters you can customize. It feels a little janky to use though.
balladeer 9y ago
WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.
- jackson1way 9y ago
  I have the same issue with the web app (using an iPhone). What I figured out is, that you don't need to unlock the screen to make the web app reconnect. All you need to do is switch on the phone (without unlocking), so just give the home button a little tap and 2-3s later the web app is reconnected. Not a great solution, but well...
  - balladeer 9y ago
    You are right. That sometimes works. But what I've noticed, maybe it's some issue with my set up - not sure, that often the WhatsApp desktop/web app doesn't connect for 1-2 minutes even after I have unlocked (or woken) my phone - so I just click on WhatsApp app on phone anyway and let it reconnect. Android and iOS both are pretty strict on background tasks these days. I hope battery tech catches up with the speed at which apps' resource appetite is growing.
amedvednikov 9y ago
I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.
- peterisza 9y ago
  Wow!
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Not native, not 90KB. The first thing it does is downloading an embedded web browser. 90KB the installer. Not native either. libpurple is native.
  - amedvednikov 9y ago
    v0.26 used to do that. Not v0.27. And yes, v0.27 is a 90KB native app. It will be released on Feb 14.
    - tramtrist 9y ago
      Pretty impressive. Any chance of tying it to IRSSI or making an IRC gateway like bitlbee? I connect to almost all those services through bitlbee already and it works pretty well. Add Naver Line support as well and I'm sold..
      - amedvednikov 9y ago
        IRC is supported, so you can use bitlbee with eul. Line messenger is not supported, but eul is modular, and everyone will be able to add support of custom messengers in the future as long as they have an open API (which Line seems to have).
- dbdr 9y ago
  Sounds impressive. Unfortunate timing that the new version is not out yet, but if it needs final touches then it does ;) Did you consider open-sourcing it? More people would probably be willing to give it a try and support you on patreon if it was.
eru 9y ago
Rest assured, Googlers mostly saw the same thing, and asked the same question "what are product managers thinking?".
- pja 9y ago
  They were probably thinking "How many features do I need to claim responsibility for in order to get that next salary / stock option boost?" By default feature creep tends to win out over less visible improvements: supporting the latter requires active effort from management.
  - eru 9y ago
    Oh, I was mostly thinking about bystanding Googlers not working on hangouts. Your description is reasonable for people working on a project. (But even inside hangouts there was dissent. I don't know too much about the specifics, and probably wouldn't be allowed to tell, if I did..)
unexistance 9y ago
the relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/

rident 9y ago

Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint. They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.

shliachtx 9y ago
Apparently they were built to mimic IRC but don't actually use it under the hood. But like you mentioned, they DO have some integration with IRC.
pr3dr49 9y ago
You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Yeah, the GitLab omnibus package comes with MatterMost bundled. It's a really nice solution for self-hosted chat.
- rident 9y ago
  Matrix [1], mentioned elsewhere in these comments, looks interesting too and the Riot [2] app is similarly styled to Slack. [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2] https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org
  - Spoom 9y ago
    Matrix is basically open source Slack. It fixes a lot of the problems that IRC had, enabling continuous presence, central authentication, easy file transfer, bot integrations, and more. I really hope it catches on more. Disclaimer: I help run a small Matrix network.
Shoothe 9y ago
> They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client. As for the XMPP gateway it's just barely usable. From my personal experience it even tended to drop messages from time to time. It seems Slack added it just to claim XMPP compatibility. Just look at where is Slack placed in this ranking https://conversations.im/compliance/ https://conversations.im/compliance/

jrockway 9y ago

> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation. As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine. My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No. For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app". I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord: https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW

commandar 9y ago
>Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. Mircrosoft's current stab at this is called Teams. I think it actually has potential: it's pretty much a clone of Slack, except that MS is willing to declare it compliant with, e.g., HIPAA.
- toyg 9y ago
  Teams is a cross between Slack and Facebook. It has channels, but also a threaded-messages structure that is just painful. Everybody in the company I work for wants to like it, but they struggle. Slack would be so much better, but then we’d lose Sharepoint and AD integration and we’d have Yet Another Silo We Have To Pay For.
- dorgo 9y ago

Semaphor 9y ago

> Skype for Business Which has a horrible UX. Personally, I use trillian to connect to facebook, jabber and others. But FB is always working hard to make that integration as bad as possible.

luka-birsa 9y ago

There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough. How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group.... Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.

Freak_NL 9y ago
Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.
- jhasse 9y ago
  A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties. Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.
    - dmytroi 9y ago
      Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se https://hitta.se

jasikpark 9y ago

Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.

donbindner 9y ago
Try to go back and delete old conversations.... Discord really falls down there.
- asherdavidson 9y ago
  They have decent search at least. Lots of filters you can customize. It feels a little janky to use though.

balladeer 9y ago

WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.

jackson1way 9y ago
I have the same issue with the web app (using an iPhone). What I figured out is, that you don't need to unlock the screen to make the web app reconnect. All you need to do is switch on the phone (without unlocking), so just give the home button a little tap and 2-3s later the web app is reconnected. Not a great solution, but well...
- balladeer 9y ago
  You are right. That sometimes works. But what I've noticed, maybe it's some issue with my set up - not sure, that often the WhatsApp desktop/web app doesn't connect for 1-2 minutes even after I have unlocked (or woken) my phone - so I just click on WhatsApp app on phone anyway and let it reconnect. Android and iOS both are pretty strict on background tasks these days. I hope battery tech catches up with the speed at which apps' resource appetite is growing.

amedvednikov 9y ago

I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.

peterisza 9y ago
Wow!
pmlnr 9y ago
Not native, not 90KB. The first thing it does is downloading an embedded web browser. 90KB the installer. Not native either. libpurple is native.
- amedvednikov 9y ago
  v0.26 used to do that. Not v0.27. And yes, v0.27 is a 90KB native app. It will be released on Feb 14.
  - tramtrist 9y ago
    Pretty impressive. Any chance of tying it to IRSSI or making an IRC gateway like bitlbee? I connect to almost all those services through bitlbee already and it works pretty well. Add Naver Line support as well and I'm sold..
    - amedvednikov 9y ago
      IRC is supported, so you can use bitlbee with eul. Line messenger is not supported, but eul is modular, and everyone will be able to add support of custom messengers in the future as long as they have an open API (which Line seems to have).
dbdr 9y ago
Sounds impressive. Unfortunate timing that the new version is not out yet, but if it needs final touches then it does ;) Did you consider open-sourcing it? More people would probably be willing to give it a try and support you on patreon if it was.

eru 9y ago

Rest assured, Googlers mostly saw the same thing, and asked the same question "what are product managers thinking?".

pja 9y ago
They were probably thinking "How many features do I need to claim responsibility for in order to get that next salary / stock option boost?" By default feature creep tends to win out over less visible improvements: supporting the latter requires active effort from management.
- eru 9y ago
  Oh, I was mostly thinking about bystanding Googlers not working on hangouts. Your description is reasonable for people working on a project. (But even inside hangouts there was dissent. I don't know too much about the specifics, and probably wouldn't be allowed to tell, if I did..)

unexistance 9y ago

the relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/