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Google Voice and Duo are not messaging apps. GTalk, Hangouts, and GMail Chat are the same thing at different iterations and were therefore fully compatible with

Google Voice and Duo are not messaging apps. GTalk, Hangouts, and GMail Chat are the same thing at different iterations and were therefore fully compatible with one another. If you're going to criticize Google for this, at least be correct when doing it.

wlesieutre 9y ago
Google Talk was federated and could chat with people who had accounts other Google, so it feels a bit unfair to lump that in. It's like saying "Gmail is compatible with hypothetical Gmail where you can only send emails to other Gmail users, it's just a different iteration." Maybe true, but suddenly a very different service.
sykh 9y ago
You make a good point but also make a broader, negative point against Google. OP's incorrectness is evidence that Google is obfuscating the purpose of their products. There’s a bewildering amount of names and products. At some point fatigue sets in for casual users/observers and everything starts to get lumped in together. I’m not going to sort it out and so in my mind these are all messaging apps. Apparently Google is trying to do something in the communication space involving voice and text. It doesnt seem to be working and it’s ended up confusing a lot of people.
illnewsthat 9y ago
Messaging is a core feature of Google Voice.
Piskvorrr 9y ago
Nope. Google broke GTalk (on purpose?) when Hangouts came out, that's not "fully compatible" in my universe.
WhyNotHugo 9y ago
No, GTalk was XMPP-compatible and federated, Hangouts was siloed. So non-google XMPP users could speak to GTalk users, but not Hangouts users.
- SamWhited 9y ago
  This was frustrating to say the least, if they'd just done a clean break it would have been annoying, but at least we all (I was using a third party client at the time) would have known what was going on, but they more or less silently broke it, but ony some of the time, and then strung it out for ages. I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to try and make the blame fall on the shoulders of third party clients instead of them for cutting it off, but who knows. I wish they'd just shut down the interop cleanly when they moved to hangouts, it would have saved me a lot of pain and debugging early on.

wlesieutre 9y ago

Google Talk was federated and could chat with people who had accounts other Google, so it feels a bit unfair to lump that in. It's like saying "Gmail is compatible with hypothetical Gmail where you can only send emails to other Gmail users, it's just a different iteration." Maybe true, but suddenly a very different service.

sykh 9y ago

You make a good point but also make a broader, negative point against Google. OP's incorrectness is evidence that Google is obfuscating the purpose of their products. There’s a bewildering amount of names and products. At some point fatigue sets in for casual users/observers and everything starts to get lumped in together. I’m not going to sort it out and so in my mind these are all messaging apps. Apparently Google is trying to do something in the communication space involving voice and text. It doesnt seem to be working and it’s ended up confusing a lot of people.

illnewsthat 9y ago

Messaging is a core feature of Google Voice.

Piskvorrr 9y ago

Nope. Google broke GTalk (on purpose?) when Hangouts came out, that's not "fully compatible" in my universe.

WhyNotHugo 9y ago

No, GTalk was XMPP-compatible and federated, Hangouts was siloed. So non-google XMPP users could speak to GTalk users, but not Hangouts users.

SamWhited 9y ago
This was frustrating to say the least, if they'd just done a clean break it would have been annoying, but at least we all (I was using a third party client at the time) would have known what was going on, but they more or less silently broke it, but ony some of the time, and then strung it out for ages. I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to try and make the blame fall on the shoulders of third party clients instead of them for cutting it off, but who knows. I wish they'd just shut down the interop cleanly when they moved to hangouts, it would have saved me a lot of pain and debugging early on.