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I’ve been using Gmail for about 15 years now, with the chat widget on the left active most of that time. For years, before mobile messaging became ubiquitous, i
by puttycat 5y ago
I’ve been using Gmail for about 15 years now, with the chat widget on the left active most of that time. For years, before mobile messaging became ubiquitous, it was my main communication channel with friends.
The widget has changed over the years, getting less and less handy and intuitive, for no apparent reason.
I would say that I’m an advanced user, to say the least, and I still have no idea what is the difference between Gtalk, Hangouts, Meet, and Chat (which is apparently the newest?).
What a mess.
- dijonman2 5y agoI block all of chat / hangouts / whatever via ublock origin. I use gmail for email only, I consider the chat client to be bloat.
- LegitShady 5y agotbe ubiquity of mobile messaging predates google hangouts by a lot.
- joshvm 5y agoCanonically you should be using Meet and Chats. These both evolved from Hangouts, though I think GMail Chat and Chats are interoperable. You can think of them as Slack and Zoom targeted towards people who have already bought into GSuite which makes sense from an org perspective, though both are usable with free accounts. Meet added features more aligned with what people expect from modern conferencing platforms (large audience casting, recordings, etc). Chat has a way to go before it uproots Slack I think, but it offers most of the same features for in-domain messaging. I've been very happy with Meet, aside from some browser quirks (blur is not available outside Chrome). It's very easy to create a new meeting and it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar. GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.
- lima 5y agoIt does seem they finally figured it out. Chat and Meet are decent, and most importantly, they're the only messaging products now.
- easrng 5y agoGoogle Voice also counts kinda, also Google Messages (SMS/MMS client but also does RCS using Google servers sometimes) and Duo.
- wffurr 5y ago>> GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago. And yet they still run the XMPP servers, though not in a way that's usable as chat. They used the same XMPP servers as GTalk for Cloud Print, for some reason. And now if they turn those servers off, a whole lot of printers with faulty back off logic will start trying to DDoS the data centers. Cheapest thing to do is apparently to just keep running the servers.
- tech234a 5y agoHadn’t considered the DDOS issue before… but why can’t they just make the XMPP server nxdomain instead so there’s nothing to DDOS?
- easrng 5y agoCloud Print is dead. Another thing that used/uses GTalk's XMPP servers is push notifications.
- wffurr 5y agoYes, but all those Cloud Print enabled printers are still out there hammering the IPs.
- samizdis 5y agoThere was an article in ArsTechnica last August - A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps [1] - that documented Google's history of messaging/chat clients. It's a sobering read. It was posted on HN and generated 80 comments [2]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727
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