17 ms·

We’re winding down Google Talk

216 points by tech234a 4y ago

al_borland 4y ago
Google's history with messaging services has been a mess. I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over. I have very little interest in anything Google makes in this space as a result. Google Talk, Chat, Meet, Duo, Messages, Hangouts.... I'm sure Im missing some. It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service.
- thefourthchime 4y ago
  It's like 12 or 13. I've never seen a company fail this much at something.. They need to create a Razzie just to give it to google for their total incompetence at chat. 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-...
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    That's a very comprehensive article, thank you, but I'm reminded of an earlier one from 2018 with the amusing title: "Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-shut-down-two-of-its-seven-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    I remember reading this article and thinking, "okay, this is already absurd, things can't get any worse" and then there's another chat engine Google once used to have. And another. And it keeps going on.
  - imglorp 4y ago
    It's only failing if you define that as "not dominating the planet's chat", which has a bunch of externalities. Several of their chat products were decent and companies were able to run all their internal meeting rooms off them. What IS a failure is the thrash within that whole set of products. Adoption of new users via network effect is the activation energy and every flipflop halves their potential new market. If they had simply stayed on, say, hangouts and kept improving it, they would keep all those users they lost.
- delecti 4y ago
  Also Allo and Buzz, plus chatting with other editors in Docs. SMS through Voice also integrated into Talk/Chat/Hangouts at various points. If they had put an even remotely competent person (who cares about more than just getting promoted) in charge and they could have been a leading player the space by just keeping things clear enough to follow.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    It is clearly the result of the internal structure of Google where no one in charge is seemingly that interested in producing cohesive products, there is apparently a kind of internal competitive economy which results in this and other nonsense.
  - IceWreck 4y ago
    Youtube Chat and Google Maps chat too
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      Why the heck would Google Maps have chat??
      - pooper 4y ago
        Waze has (or has had) beep beep as long as I can remember but nobody questions why Waze has chat...
        petre 4y ago
        So you can text while in a traffic jam and probably hit the car in front if you?
      - vagrantJin 4y ago
        Ask for directions? ba dum tssss.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over I'm sure literally thousands of Google employees have gotten promoted on the strength of their work on building out yet another new chat platform. That's why they keep doing this; it has nothing to do with any sort of broad corporate strategy. It's individuals optimizing for their own success instead of for some vague notion of corporate success.
  - akkartik 4y ago
    That explanation helps but doesn't explain why new chat apps get greenlit more often than new local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots.
    - andrewstuart2 4y ago
      Promotion Driven Development combined with https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ and a heaping helping of decentralized decision making and probably charisma in order to convince someone that This Time It's Different™.
      - travisgriggs 4y ago
        A never ending boatload of enabling cash from the golden goose of adtech monopoly certainly contributes to this as well?
        YZF 4y ago
        Definitely. Basically the business results (ad revenue) is more or less decoupled, in the short and medium terms, from what I would guess 90% of engineers in Google do. So calculate digits of Pi, write books and blog posts, write chat apps, reinvent any wheel possible, rewrite code all the time. A lot of Google's software is actually becoming worse, search, chat, navigation/maps as the 10% that are doing valuable work are fighting entropy and the other 90%. Pure speculation (other than the part about their software becoming worse) so would be interested in the insider's take here. That said it's a pattern I've seen in other places. It's crazy that with so many people of this caliber they're basically spinning their wheels in many areas. Some progress in a few areas, like cloud.
- gedy 4y ago
  Yeah I'm just one person, but their confusing and chaotic approach to messaging apps and the Inbox vs GMail thing a few years ago were the two things what turned me from respecting Google and interested in their new apps into believing the don't have any idea or care what they are doing and better off not trying out or depending on their offerings. (Thank goodness they haven't done same to maps and docs).
  - techdragon 4y ago
    That’s a really good way to describe it. I no longer respect Google. Their core search engine is in decline, their cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors, they began weaponising open source as a recruitment pipeline, and they can deliver a product with any sort of expectation that it will last more than 12 months anymore… I have lost respect for them. I have gone from an enthusiastic Search and chrome and gmail user… I got into the invite only beta in the first six months! … to basically only caring when Google do things that affect the non-stuff I actually care about.
    - brian_cunnie 4y ago
      > cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors I beg to disagree: I find AWS's UI the most confusing--I am showered with services I don't use & don't know what they do (Beanstalk? I have no idea what that is). I find that if I stick with VPC and EC2 I'm safe, but even then they throw some curve balls at you: for example, VPC is all about networking & IP addresses unless you're talking about Elastic IPs, in which case you need to go to EC2. Azure's interface is okay, but the sliding menus-thing throws me off. Google's is the cleanest UI IMHO. Not too many services, intelligently grouped. Although I've used AWS the longest & am used to its idiosyncrasies, I'm under no illusion that its UI well laid out.
- jedberg 4y ago
  >It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service. It happens because of their internal promotion culture. You get a promotion much faster if you make something new than if you improve something old.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    Don’t they have a rule that you can’t create something that competes with another Google product? How do any of these get created in the first place?
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      There is no such rule. "Make a better thing thats so good that the users all choose to use the new thing over the old thing" is the aim...
      - al_borland 4y ago
        That was probably a fine idea when they were getting started and just throwing ideas against the wall when starting at 0, but they are a big establish company with big established products. They can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater every time and expect users to actually be on board. Google Wave was the perfect example of that. Wave would have been amazing if it was integrated into Gmail. Like Apple did with iMessage, if a Gmail user emailed another Gmail user (or group of users) it would turn into a Wave and get a bunch of extra features. This would have provided value, instantly given it millions of users, and encouraged current users to get their friends and co-workers on Gmail to use Waves. Instead, they made it it's own invite-only service (trying to recreate the Gmail magic) and it was a failure due to lack of users. This is a horrible strategy and they are going to continue shooting themselves in the foot if they don't pivot.
      - houseofzeus 4y ago
        Also, never consider how you will migrate users of the old thing if you are ever actually successful.
- duxup 4y ago
  > are always starting over I wouldn’t mind it if they kept features or something. Some coherent process, features, etc. But it is a half baked deal every time with old / obvious features missing. They operate like a mini no name start up and as far as I’m concerned I don’t think of it that way / if it has the name Google I expect some level of polish…maybe respect the users who get dragged from app to app…
  - noneeeed 4y ago
    It's like what happened with Google Pay (I think it was that) where they rewrote it from scratch with fewer features, it was so bizarre.
    - denimnerd42 4y ago
      google play music to yt music. they rewrote from scratch with less features and more bugs
- refulgentis 4y ago
  HN tends to read deprecation notices (in this case, for a 17 year old frontend) and immediately bring up every marketing name for anything and everything involving text communication Google has ever made. For the record: - v1 - "Gchat" - simple chat added to Gmail - v2 - "Google Talk" - 2005 - general chat service created out of "Gchat" enabling people to use it outside Gmail - v3 - "Google Hangouts" - 2013 - integrate video chat from G+ into Talk - v4 - "Google Meet/Chat" - 2017 - split Hangouts into video (Meet) and messaging (Chat)
  - mpol 4y ago
    If it is all different frontends to the same backend, they very much failed at marketing. For an advertising company, creating this much chaos in their branding and communication is very confusing and somewhat laughable.
    - q-big 4y ago
      > For an advertising company Google is not an advertising company, but a provider of space for advertising.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Distinction without a difference Its not like they assemble billboards
        joshuamorton 4y ago
        Idk that really feels like what adsense and such are.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Do people that make billboards create complex algorythms to evaluate their efficiency and charge you per each glance the billboard get?
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  When are we going to get the google version of WOOF to unify all of these disparate services?
  - triggerman722 4y ago
    Underrated post...assuming you mean wuphf lol
- dehrmann 4y ago
  They also acquihired Meebo.
- torvald 4y ago
  Don't forget a out Google Wave!
  - flowerbeater 4y ago
    Or Google Buzz!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago
  Was it Google Messages the one that came up as a pop-up in gmail and let you very easily do videoconferencing? I can't remember.
fritigern 4y ago
[flagged]
dom96 4y ago
How long before Google Chat is dead?
- shagie 4y ago
  There was a joke making its rounds back in May... > Overheard at Google IO: They’re making 6 new chat apps this year and decommissioning 7 of them.
comrad 4y ago
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    This is a 16 year old front end to the same chat service that you think of as Gmail chat / Gchat / Hangouts / etc., not sure if that's clear.
    - Inhibit 4y ago
      If it's only a frontend how does "we'll end our support for third-party apps, including Pidgin and Gajim" make sense? Just coinciding? That's what made me assume it was a whole stack rather than interface to a backend.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
  - ehsankia 4y ago
    Ironically, Google Talk has already been on there and shows "2005 - 2013", so tells you about the accuracy of these websites.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I think it's Google's branding. Google Talk used to be a desktop app on your PC that eventually became hangouts which lines up with the sunset in 2013 when desktop apps kind of died.. I think for some reason, google is called this Google Talk instead of hangouts and moving people to chat.
      - 4y ago
lousken 4y ago
rip xmpp support?
- leni536 4y ago
  Wasn't xmpp support dropped years ago?
  - MattJ100 4y ago
    They've gradually broken it over the years, but it still runs in some limited form. It's barely interoperable with modern XMPP, but occasionally I hear of people still using it.
- mixedmath 4y ago
  I guess. I've used the same xmpp integration for almost 15 years now. I remember thinking it was going to stop working at some point in the past, but it kept on chugging. I think maybe this time it will really die. Too bad!
colechristensen 4y ago
Which one was google talk?
- lelandfe 4y ago
  For the last 5 years? Just a service. Google shut down all first party apps starting in 2012 and wrapping in 2017. Amusingly, they started sunsetting it to support the move to Google+ Hangouts. Not only does Google+ no longer exist, not only does Google+ Hangouts no longer exist, the progeny Google Hangouts is also dead.
- leetrout 4y ago
  The first one. XMPP that worked with programs like Trillian and Adium.
  - ballenf 4y ago
    It even worked cross-platform with Messages (iMessages?) on Max OSX.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      Until Apple killed IMServicePlugin :(
coffeeblack 4y ago
kgbcia 4y ago
Imagine if I did that to a production database. Instead of altering a table, just start over every schema change. Agile.
mupuff1234 4y ago
I mean, is anyone using it? Thought it was dead a long time ago.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Google honestly has the worst products of any large tech. Confusing and irritating. The only bright spark they had was the single search box on the homepage. And that was a stroke of luck. I am sure if they tried anything else, they would have messed it up.
- pjerem 4y ago
  Right. But when it comes to confusing and irritating products, Microsoft is also very good.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    No one can match Microsoft for terrible naming and mind-bogglingly bad name changes. The epitome is the chat platform: starting out as the very generic Office Communications Server, then switching to the surprisingly clever Lync (short and unique, fantastically searchable), but then taking a turn for the literally blocked by corporate web proxies and unsearchable Skype for Business (the docs about switching to the new version were on hard-blocked skype.com), with confusing Skype for Business Online (same client, utterly different back end), and now to even less searchable Teams. I guess having two of their foundational products be extremely common English utterances just set them up for this lack of reflection.
  - 0des 4y ago
    ribbon toolbar, clippy, the list goes on
- petre 4y ago
  The annoying thing is that they put a search box on my phone's home screen, which I can't hide, even if I disable it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
meibo 4y ago
We migrated to Chat with our organization when they recommended it... It was rough for a while and it should've been in the oven for half a year longer, but now, it's an alright experience that ties in very well with the rest of workspace, especially considering that it's free of charge.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  It’s still pretty rough as far as features go. You can’t automatically set a channel to be marked as read, for example.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    It's beta! "Google Chat is now available in early preview for personal Google Accounts on Android and desktop. When you turn on Google Chat in Gmail settings, you can test the experience and features. You may not be able to switch back to classic Hangouts in Gmail settings." -- https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7653601 https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7653601 Only giant monopoly profits can sustain decades-long incompetency like Google's messaging systems.
    - rurp 4y ago
      > It's beta! Hah yeah, Google has only spent the last, what, 10 years developing video chat apps? It just blows my mind what a dunpster fire their text and video chat app conveyor belt has been.
      - nso95 4y ago
        How many years was GMail beta?
losingom 4y ago
If nothing else, it's impressive that they've actually managed to migrate those Google Talk users over the years (myself included in that, albeit less than I used to). They probably did so extremely begrudgingly, but the path went something like: Google Talk -> Hangouts -> Google Chat People I added years ago are still reachable in Chat, which I guess is nice (in spite of everything else).
- utucuro 4y ago
  Who says that they managed it? I went from Google Talk to Hangouts to no Google Services aside from Play store, kept only because of Android devices... Ideally I would not rely on any Google services, but it is not feasible for me...
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Indeed, while not ideal, generally they've had a decent migration path. At least for the "message someone inside Gmail" usecase, as far as people are concern, for most people nothing has changed other than some slight UI. Outside of Gmail (especially on android) it is not as clean though.
  - lurquer 4y ago
- ghaff 4y ago
  And Google Chat is pretty decent IMO if you're committed to Google Workspace. How you use it is probably a bit cultural. Where I work--or at least the teams I interact with--it seems to have developed into use Chat if you want a somewhat near-time response rather than email. At least the people I know rarely text these days and essentially never call on voice. Group chats vary by context.
  - garciasn 4y ago
    The UX is absolutely horrendous. Don’t even get me started about the 4096 character limit or the fact that URLs in code blocks breaks the code block. How about not being able to sort the user list by whatever order you want or folding groups? What about it creating “Spaces” for chats with more than one contact and forcing you to “leave” if you want to hide it to keep your list clean? Maybe we should talk about how they recently started capturing, poorly, formatted text when you paste, forcing a paste with match style to strip it and no way to remove that default. Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app. Maybe we could add in there’s no user configuration ability at all. Fuck Google Chat. It’s a horrendous piece of shit and it needs to die, not third party support.
travisgriggs 4y ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/ ?
  - travisgriggs 4y ago
    Made my day, despite the downvotes. Thanks. Especially the “and the 8.8.8.8 DNS server”
tims33 4y ago
The problem with chat is that every big tech company is only interested in "winning" vs driving usage. Google would be better off fighting for open standards to improve their position in this market. Open standards in the 70s, 80s, and 90s did such great things for technology.
- brian_cunnie 4y ago
  Good point! I think the EU is gonna force Apple to open up Messages, in which case Apple Messages will become the _de facto_ standard.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I don't want iMessage to be a _de facto_ standard. I want my work stuff to be mostly on my work channels. Very little work stuff gets onto my cell phone number which includes iMessage.
    - petre 4y ago
      In France they have a law that the employer is not allowed to call you off work hours. I think it should also apply to instant messaging. They also have another good law which prohibits eating in the office, so they all have to take the lunch break off and eat at a restaurant or bistro or canteen. Which is great because food delivery also generates single use food container waste and also food waste. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your-desk-is-banned-in-france-lunch-law https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your...
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I mostly don't even want IMs on my personal phone though--and I don't want to carry two phones. I personally have no issue with doing some quick work off and on after hours--so long as you have no trouble with me taking care of some errands during the day. Seems a pretty good tradeoff. When I went into an office, I would sometimes grab lunch at my desk if I just wanted some calories and wrap up my day as quickly as possible. Otherwise I'd eat with people in the cafeteria or go out (options for both of which varied a lot by job).
tyingq 4y ago
I can't remember if this means my Polycom Google Voice ATA stops working or not. There was at least one third party Google Voice thing that needed Google Talk to work.
sayrer 4y ago
So weird, because they actually had the best one for some time. The Windows Google Talk client was amazing.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  everything about it was great except the google part. That part makes it unusable. whatsapp is a bit of a turd but i don't expect it to get janked half way the conversation.
oivey 4y ago
A normal company would have had basically one product all these years and not renamed it just due to internal engineering efforts. I also imagine chat apps are great for promotion driven development. Not that hard to make from scratch relative to something like search or maps. I’m surprised Gmail isn’t constantly cannibalized, although still it has been a small amount. Some execs must be protecting dilution of that important brand.
- esrauch 4y ago
  They did do Inbox which tried to cannabalize Gmail but it ended with it merging some features back in to Gmail instead.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
    I really miss inbox
    - gryfft 4y ago
      The only thing more upsetting to me than having Inbox foisted on me was having it torn away from me afterwards. I was resistant to more change for the sake of change from Google, then Inbox won me over with its excellent UI. It became a combination of to-do list, email, and calendar that felt like an extension of my brain. The tiny concessions to its good UX that were pulled into Gmail were cold comfort. The equivalent functionality in GCalendar is way more clunky.
      - danpalmer 4y ago
        But Inbox was never foisted on anybody, the standard Gmail interface has always been available.
        gryfft 4y ago
        I guess I'm misremembering again.
  - 4y ago
sergiotapia 4y ago
Talk, chat, meet, hangouts, duo? Are these the same - what will gsuite users use wtf
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BonoboIO 4y ago
At this time it is a running gag that Google creates a messenger every one or two years. They have so much leverage with google accounts, gmail and android … pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world. But they achieved to even cripple Google Meets, a product that works. Unbelievable.
- newsclues 4y ago
  Failing to avoid antitrust issues if they succeed and become the dominant hub for online?
  - rwalle 4y ago
    I don't think anyone antitrust is relevant at all in this discussion. Nobody would think that Google Talk/Chat/Whatever is remotely close to being scrutinized by government agencies.
  - BonoboIO 4y ago
    They „sponsor“ with x00 millions to exist. A competitor is great, because it avoids antitrusts like Microsoft had with IE.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  > pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world. True. It is frankly amazing how Google can't compete in that area They lack the vision. They lack the top-down mandate. They lack the will to centralize and push the effort. (see how most projects were experiments/things that "stuck"). I think one of the few times where Google successfully managed a global project to completion was Android? (and yet it was acquired)
- hypothesis 4y ago
  Current wisdom is that company exists to make money and everything is optimized for that. What if workers are fully onboard and working hard for next promotion? For products that are not money making machines like the ad biz, let them wither and start a new every couple years?
UweSchmidt 4y ago
Most comments are critical about Google's way of doing things, but maybe this is a good moment for an eulogy. Is anyone using Google Talk right now or has good things to say about it? Was it a place where you happened to have meaningful conversation? (Not me, but sometimes I'm nostalgic about internet places that came and went...)
- civilized 4y ago
  It would be great just to get an explanation of how people were even using it. Most users were kicked off Google Talk around 2013. Apparently third party apps were somehow allowed to continue using it.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    They weren't kicked off. It was just known to people that only used the web app as Hangouts.
- Macha 4y ago
  It was fine. I talked to some people in there, I plugged it into Pidgin as I did those days, it was nice that I could talk to other people using my own domain and later moved to other providers without contacts noticing. Because it was open I could use a generic interface to it, which was good for me as it let me shove it into the same app as MSN, YIM and AIM, but not so good for Google as it didn't make it particularly sticky, which I gather is why they shelved it for hangouts (though they did leave it's undead corpse shamble on)
eternityforest 4y ago
I just ignore any news relating to google communication services. Other than gmail, I just expect it to vanish in 18 months or less.
- move-on-by 4y ago
  Google Inbox was amazing. I was a huge Gmail fan, I had all sorts of automatic rules, and labels, etc- then I tried Inbox. All of a sudden Gmail became an unmanageable mess compared to the simplicity of Inbox. But of course, Google killed inbox. It was the exact thing I needed to get out of Google. I use my own domain email now and have switched between a couple different providers. Of course I still have my Gmail email- but it just forwards to my main email now. Other then for work, I’ve fully de-googled my personal usage of Google. All thanks to them showing me the glory of Inbox and then killing it. Thanks Google!
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Never heard of Inbox till now, but it looks like it was pretty cool. I wonder if you could make a clone of it that used normal gmail(Or whatever other provider, if you degoogled) as a backend?
remflight 4y ago
I have successfully migrated almost all my contacts off Google Chat to either Whatsapp or Signal. The only holdout is my wife. Everyone else agreed that Google Chat is the worst of the bunch and their product hasn’t changed or improved in years. I would love an explanation as to why this persists. Google has now become the place where products go to die and no one at Google seems to care. Nest is another company that hasn’t innovated or added significant new features in years. Same goes with Waze. Apple Maps is now the best navigation app because they have invested in innovation and for some reason Google won’t.
dasz 4y ago
So, talk is now done. Great. What's next? Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether. I'm sure I missed one.
- krolden 4y ago
  Phoneblocks
- Markoff 4y ago
  Just ignore any communication app coming from Google, it will be sooner or later killed.
- gaws 4y ago
  > Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether. You will use each one of them, and you will like it.
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
I really had a Mandela effect here: I thought Google Talk had died a long, long time ago, having been replaced with Hangouts.
- trashface 4y ago
  I had the exact same response. Its hard to keep track of which chat apps google has killed and which are still alive.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Yes and no.. Google Talk is the same as Hangouts, but the name of their XMPP service that connected to Hangouts.
brightball 4y ago
Fwiw, Google Chat and Spaces, while not on the same level as Slack are definitely filling the “good enough to stick with” niche at a small company I’m helping now. If they actually commit to improving it, there’s real potential there.
zmmmmm 4y ago
I kept using Hangouts for so long because of one thing only: XMPP support. Even without federation it put Hangouts into a different tier of service. Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol. What a sad state of affairs to be in 25 years after we had dozens of interoperable clients / protocols in routine use.
- stonecharioteer 4y ago
  I used Miranda IM to chat with people on yim, msnm and gtalk all the time. It was amazing. Pidgin was good too. I miss that. I wish Facebook/Instagram chat, whatsapp and iMessage all supported XMPP.
- justshowpost 4y ago
  > Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol. Matrix
bradgessler 4y ago
Google has had so many variants of this that I don’t even know what they’re shutting down by just reading the headline.
- agilob 4y ago
  Let me help you, if you type `/hangout` command in Slack, it opens google meet...
  - rrix2 4y ago
    And if you just type / and find that option in the list it's listed as a "Google+ Hangout"!
- bborud 4y ago
  If Google hadn’t been so obsessed with making messaging special (one way or another) they might have managed to make it good.
- andrepd 4y ago
  GChat, Talk, Duo, Meet, Hangouts... what did I miss?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Allo
    - Animats 4y ago
      Orkut.
      - lowdest 4y ago
        Wave
  - morepork 4y ago
    Messages, Voice, Allo (rip) even Google docs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...
beachy 4y ago
I feel like my brain is now trained to skip over any Google chat-oriented product names or any information whatsoever about them simply because of the continuous churn. Instead I'm trained to just look for something that looks like a chat window and use that. I literally have no idea which one I actually use, nor whether this announcement affects me. I would love to know if inside Google there is any long term analysis of this. Is it just a series of teams getting accolades each year/quarter for Yet Another Chat Service? Or is someone taking the long view and evlauating just how much market confusion Google have spawned with this ridiculous never-ending saga?
- bogota 4y ago
  You are not alone in feeling this way. Hangouts was awesome and for a while my friend group tried to keep up with whatever googles newly pitched chat app was. We all just use WhatsApp now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
amachefe 4y ago
Loved Google Talk. Lightweight simple and does the job very well. Havent trusted Google after the moved off it.
miked85 4y ago
I didn't realize Google Talk existed anymore. Google has gone through at last a half dozen iterations of chat applications. I don't even know what the latest one is.

216 points by tech234a 4y ago

Google's history with messaging services has been a mess. I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over. I have very little interest in anything Google makes in this space as a result. Google Talk, Chat, Meet, Duo, Messages, Hangouts.... I'm sure Im missing some. It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service.

thefourthchime 4y ago
It's like 12 or 13. I've never seen a company fail this much at something.. They need to create a Razzie just to give it to google for their total incompetence at chat. 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-...
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  That's a very comprehensive article, thank you, but I'm reminded of an earlier one from 2018 with the amusing title: "Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-shut-down-two-of-its-seven-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  I remember reading this article and thinking, "okay, this is already absurd, things can't get any worse" and then there's another chat engine Google once used to have. And another. And it keeps going on.
- imglorp 4y ago
  It's only failing if you define that as "not dominating the planet's chat", which has a bunch of externalities. Several of their chat products were decent and companies were able to run all their internal meeting rooms off them. What IS a failure is the thrash within that whole set of products. Adoption of new users via network effect is the activation energy and every flipflop halves their potential new market. If they had simply stayed on, say, hangouts and kept improving it, they would keep all those users they lost.
delecti 4y ago
Also Allo and Buzz, plus chatting with other editors in Docs. SMS through Voice also integrated into Talk/Chat/Hangouts at various points. If they had put an even remotely competent person (who cares about more than just getting promoted) in charge and they could have been a leading player the space by just keeping things clear enough to follow.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It is clearly the result of the internal structure of Google where no one in charge is seemingly that interested in producing cohesive products, there is apparently a kind of internal competitive economy which results in this and other nonsense.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  Youtube Chat and Google Maps chat too
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Why the heck would Google Maps have chat??
    - pooper 4y ago
      Waze has (or has had) beep beep as long as I can remember but nobody questions why Waze has chat...
      - petre 4y ago
        So you can text while in a traffic jam and probably hit the car in front if you?
    - vagrantJin 4y ago
      Ask for directions? ba dum tssss.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over I'm sure literally thousands of Google employees have gotten promoted on the strength of their work on building out yet another new chat platform. That's why they keep doing this; it has nothing to do with any sort of broad corporate strategy. It's individuals optimizing for their own success instead of for some vague notion of corporate success.
- akkartik 4y ago
  That explanation helps but doesn't explain why new chat apps get greenlit more often than new local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots.
  - andrewstuart2 4y ago
    Promotion Driven Development combined with https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ and a heaping helping of decentralized decision making and probably charisma in order to convince someone that This Time It's Different™.
    - travisgriggs 4y ago
      A never ending boatload of enabling cash from the golden goose of adtech monopoly certainly contributes to this as well?
      - YZF 4y ago
        Definitely. Basically the business results (ad revenue) is more or less decoupled, in the short and medium terms, from what I would guess 90% of engineers in Google do. So calculate digits of Pi, write books and blog posts, write chat apps, reinvent any wheel possible, rewrite code all the time. A lot of Google's software is actually becoming worse, search, chat, navigation/maps as the 10% that are doing valuable work are fighting entropy and the other 90%. Pure speculation (other than the part about their software becoming worse) so would be interested in the insider's take here. That said it's a pattern I've seen in other places. It's crazy that with so many people of this caliber they're basically spinning their wheels in many areas. Some progress in a few areas, like cloud.
gedy 4y ago
Yeah I'm just one person, but their confusing and chaotic approach to messaging apps and the Inbox vs GMail thing a few years ago were the two things what turned me from respecting Google and interested in their new apps into believing the don't have any idea or care what they are doing and better off not trying out or depending on their offerings. (Thank goodness they haven't done same to maps and docs).
- techdragon 4y ago
  That’s a really good way to describe it. I no longer respect Google. Their core search engine is in decline, their cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors, they began weaponising open source as a recruitment pipeline, and they can deliver a product with any sort of expectation that it will last more than 12 months anymore… I have lost respect for them. I have gone from an enthusiastic Search and chrome and gmail user… I got into the invite only beta in the first six months! … to basically only caring when Google do things that affect the non-stuff I actually care about.
  - brian_cunnie 4y ago
    > cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors I beg to disagree: I find AWS's UI the most confusing--I am showered with services I don't use & don't know what they do (Beanstalk? I have no idea what that is). I find that if I stick with VPC and EC2 I'm safe, but even then they throw some curve balls at you: for example, VPC is all about networking & IP addresses unless you're talking about Elastic IPs, in which case you need to go to EC2. Azure's interface is okay, but the sliding menus-thing throws me off. Google's is the cleanest UI IMHO. Not too many services, intelligently grouped. Although I've used AWS the longest & am used to its idiosyncrasies, I'm under no illusion that its UI well laid out.
jedberg 4y ago
>It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service. It happens because of their internal promotion culture. You get a promotion much faster if you make something new than if you improve something old.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  Don’t they have a rule that you can’t create something that competes with another Google product? How do any of these get created in the first place?
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    There is no such rule. "Make a better thing thats so good that the users all choose to use the new thing over the old thing" is the aim...
    - al_borland 4y ago
      That was probably a fine idea when they were getting started and just throwing ideas against the wall when starting at 0, but they are a big establish company with big established products. They can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater every time and expect users to actually be on board. Google Wave was the perfect example of that. Wave would have been amazing if it was integrated into Gmail. Like Apple did with iMessage, if a Gmail user emailed another Gmail user (or group of users) it would turn into a Wave and get a bunch of extra features. This would have provided value, instantly given it millions of users, and encouraged current users to get their friends and co-workers on Gmail to use Waves. Instead, they made it it's own invite-only service (trying to recreate the Gmail magic) and it was a failure due to lack of users. This is a horrible strategy and they are going to continue shooting themselves in the foot if they don't pivot.
    - houseofzeus 4y ago
      Also, never consider how you will migrate users of the old thing if you are ever actually successful.
duxup 4y ago
> are always starting over I wouldn’t mind it if they kept features or something. Some coherent process, features, etc. But it is a half baked deal every time with old / obvious features missing. They operate like a mini no name start up and as far as I’m concerned I don’t think of it that way / if it has the name Google I expect some level of polish…maybe respect the users who get dragged from app to app…
- noneeeed 4y ago
  It's like what happened with Google Pay (I think it was that) where they rewrote it from scratch with fewer features, it was so bizarre.
  - denimnerd42 4y ago
    google play music to yt music. they rewrote from scratch with less features and more bugs
refulgentis 4y ago
HN tends to read deprecation notices (in this case, for a 17 year old frontend) and immediately bring up every marketing name for anything and everything involving text communication Google has ever made. For the record: - v1 - "Gchat" - simple chat added to Gmail - v2 - "Google Talk" - 2005 - general chat service created out of "Gchat" enabling people to use it outside Gmail - v3 - "Google Hangouts" - 2013 - integrate video chat from G+ into Talk - v4 - "Google Meet/Chat" - 2017 - split Hangouts into video (Meet) and messaging (Chat)
- mpol 4y ago
  If it is all different frontends to the same backend, they very much failed at marketing. For an advertising company, creating this much chaos in their branding and communication is very confusing and somewhat laughable.
  - q-big 4y ago
    > For an advertising company Google is not an advertising company, but a provider of space for advertising.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Distinction without a difference Its not like they assemble billboards
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        Idk that really feels like what adsense and such are.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Do people that make billboards create complex algorythms to evaluate their efficiency and charge you per each glance the billboard get?
throwaway675309 4y ago
When are we going to get the google version of WOOF to unify all of these disparate services?
- triggerman722 4y ago
  Underrated post...assuming you mean wuphf lol
dehrmann 4y ago
They also acquihired Meebo.
torvald 4y ago
Don't forget a out Google Wave!
- flowerbeater 4y ago
  Or Google Buzz!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PontifexMinimus 4y ago
Was it Google Messages the one that came up as a pop-up in gmail and let you very easily do videoconferencing? I can't remember.

fritigern 4y ago

[flagged]

dom96 4y ago

How long before Google Chat is dead?

shagie 4y ago
There was a joke making its rounds back in May... > Overheard at Google IO: They’re making 6 new chat apps this year and decommissioning 7 of them.

comrad 4y ago

MaxBarraclough 4y ago
- refulgentis 4y ago
  This is a 16 year old front end to the same chat service that you think of as Gmail chat / Gchat / Hangouts / etc., not sure if that's clear.
  - Inhibit 4y ago
    If it's only a frontend how does "we'll end our support for third-party apps, including Pidgin and Gajim" make sense? Just coinciding? That's what made me assume it was a whole stack rather than interface to a backend.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Ironically, Google Talk has already been on there and shows "2005 - 2013", so tells you about the accuracy of these websites.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I think it's Google's branding. Google Talk used to be a desktop app on your PC that eventually became hangouts which lines up with the sunset in 2013 when desktop apps kind of died.. I think for some reason, google is called this Google Talk instead of hangouts and moving people to chat.
    - 4y ago

lousken 4y ago

rip xmpp support?

leni536 4y ago
Wasn't xmpp support dropped years ago?
- MattJ100 4y ago
  They've gradually broken it over the years, but it still runs in some limited form. It's barely interoperable with modern XMPP, but occasionally I hear of people still using it.
mixedmath 4y ago
I guess. I've used the same xmpp integration for almost 15 years now. I remember thinking it was going to stop working at some point in the past, but it kept on chugging. I think maybe this time it will really die. Too bad!

colechristensen 4y ago

Which one was google talk?

lelandfe 4y ago
For the last 5 years? Just a service. Google shut down all first party apps starting in 2012 and wrapping in 2017. Amusingly, they started sunsetting it to support the move to Google+ Hangouts. Not only does Google+ no longer exist, not only does Google+ Hangouts no longer exist, the progeny Google Hangouts is also dead.
leetrout 4y ago
The first one. XMPP that worked with programs like Trillian and Adium.
- ballenf 4y ago
  It even worked cross-platform with Messages (iMessages?) on Max OSX.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Until Apple killed IMServicePlugin :(

coffeeblack 4y ago

kgbcia 4y ago

Imagine if I did that to a production database. Instead of altering a table, just start over every schema change. Agile.

mupuff1234 4y ago

I mean, is anyone using it? Thought it was dead a long time ago.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Google honestly has the worst products of any large tech. Confusing and irritating. The only bright spark they had was the single search box on the homepage. And that was a stroke of luck. I am sure if they tried anything else, they would have messed it up.

pjerem 4y ago
Right. But when it comes to confusing and irritating products, Microsoft is also very good.
- MandieD 4y ago
  No one can match Microsoft for terrible naming and mind-bogglingly bad name changes. The epitome is the chat platform: starting out as the very generic Office Communications Server, then switching to the surprisingly clever Lync (short and unique, fantastically searchable), but then taking a turn for the literally blocked by corporate web proxies and unsearchable Skype for Business (the docs about switching to the new version were on hard-blocked skype.com), with confusing Skype for Business Online (same client, utterly different back end), and now to even less searchable Teams. I guess having two of their foundational products be extremely common English utterances just set them up for this lack of reflection.
- 0des 4y ago
  ribbon toolbar, clippy, the list goes on
petre 4y ago
The annoying thing is that they put a search box on my phone's home screen, which I can't hide, even if I disable it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

meibo 4y ago

We migrated to Chat with our organization when they recommended it... It was rough for a while and it should've been in the oven for half a year longer, but now, it's an alright experience that ties in very well with the rest of workspace, especially considering that it's free of charge.

akmarinov 4y ago
It’s still pretty rough as far as features go. You can’t automatically set a channel to be marked as read, for example.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  It's beta! "Google Chat is now available in early preview for personal Google Accounts on Android and desktop. When you turn on Google Chat in Gmail settings, you can test the experience and features. You may not be able to switch back to classic Hangouts in Gmail settings." -- https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7653601 https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7653601 Only giant monopoly profits can sustain decades-long incompetency like Google's messaging systems.
  - rurp 4y ago
    > It's beta! Hah yeah, Google has only spent the last, what, 10 years developing video chat apps? It just blows my mind what a dunpster fire their text and video chat app conveyor belt has been.
    - nso95 4y ago
      How many years was GMail beta?

losingom 4y ago

If nothing else, it's impressive that they've actually managed to migrate those Google Talk users over the years (myself included in that, albeit less than I used to). They probably did so extremely begrudgingly, but the path went something like: Google Talk -> Hangouts -> Google Chat People I added years ago are still reachable in Chat, which I guess is nice (in spite of everything else).

utucuro 4y ago
Who says that they managed it? I went from Google Talk to Hangouts to no Google Services aside from Play store, kept only because of Android devices... Ideally I would not rely on any Google services, but it is not feasible for me...
ehsankia 4y ago
Indeed, while not ideal, generally they've had a decent migration path. At least for the "message someone inside Gmail" usecase, as far as people are concern, for most people nothing has changed other than some slight UI. Outside of Gmail (especially on android) it is not as clean though.
- lurquer 4y ago
ghaff 4y ago
And Google Chat is pretty decent IMO if you're committed to Google Workspace. How you use it is probably a bit cultural. Where I work--or at least the teams I interact with--it seems to have developed into use Chat if you want a somewhat near-time response rather than email. At least the people I know rarely text these days and essentially never call on voice. Group chats vary by context.
- garciasn 4y ago
  The UX is absolutely horrendous. Don’t even get me started about the 4096 character limit or the fact that URLs in code blocks breaks the code block. How about not being able to sort the user list by whatever order you want or folding groups? What about it creating “Spaces” for chats with more than one contact and forcing you to “leave” if you want to hide it to keep your list clean? Maybe we should talk about how they recently started capturing, poorly, formatted text when you paste, forcing a paste with match style to strip it and no way to remove that default. Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app. Maybe we could add in there’s no user configuration ability at all. Fuck Google Chat. It’s a horrendous piece of shit and it needs to die, not third party support.

travisgriggs 4y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/ ?
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  Made my day, despite the downvotes. Thanks. Especially the “and the 8.8.8.8 DNS server”

tims33 4y ago

The problem with chat is that every big tech company is only interested in "winning" vs driving usage. Google would be better off fighting for open standards to improve their position in this market. Open standards in the 70s, 80s, and 90s did such great things for technology.

brian_cunnie 4y ago
Good point! I think the EU is gonna force Apple to open up Messages, in which case Apple Messages will become the _de facto_ standard.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I don't want iMessage to be a _de facto_ standard. I want my work stuff to be mostly on my work channels. Very little work stuff gets onto my cell phone number which includes iMessage.
  - petre 4y ago
    In France they have a law that the employer is not allowed to call you off work hours. I think it should also apply to instant messaging. They also have another good law which prohibits eating in the office, so they all have to take the lunch break off and eat at a restaurant or bistro or canteen. Which is great because food delivery also generates single use food container waste and also food waste. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your-desk-is-banned-in-france-lunch-law https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your...
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I mostly don't even want IMs on my personal phone though--and I don't want to carry two phones. I personally have no issue with doing some quick work off and on after hours--so long as you have no trouble with me taking care of some errands during the day. Seems a pretty good tradeoff. When I went into an office, I would sometimes grab lunch at my desk if I just wanted some calories and wrap up my day as quickly as possible. Otherwise I'd eat with people in the cafeteria or go out (options for both of which varied a lot by job).

tyingq 4y ago

I can't remember if this means my Polycom Google Voice ATA stops working or not. There was at least one third party Google Voice thing that needed Google Talk to work.

sayrer 4y ago

So weird, because they actually had the best one for some time. The Windows Google Talk client was amazing.

throwaway14356 4y ago
everything about it was great except the google part. That part makes it unusable. whatsapp is a bit of a turd but i don't expect it to get janked half way the conversation.

oivey 4y ago

A normal company would have had basically one product all these years and not renamed it just due to internal engineering efforts. I also imagine chat apps are great for promotion driven development. Not that hard to make from scratch relative to something like search or maps. I’m surprised Gmail isn’t constantly cannibalized, although still it has been a small amount. Some execs must be protecting dilution of that important brand.

esrauch 4y ago
They did do Inbox which tried to cannabalize Gmail but it ended with it merging some features back in to Gmail instead.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  I really miss inbox
  - gryfft 4y ago
    The only thing more upsetting to me than having Inbox foisted on me was having it torn away from me afterwards. I was resistant to more change for the sake of change from Google, then Inbox won me over with its excellent UI. It became a combination of to-do list, email, and calendar that felt like an extension of my brain. The tiny concessions to its good UX that were pulled into Gmail were cold comfort. The equivalent functionality in GCalendar is way more clunky.
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      But Inbox was never foisted on anybody, the standard Gmail interface has always been available.
      - gryfft 4y ago
        I guess I'm misremembering again.
- 4y ago

sergiotapia 4y ago

Talk, chat, meet, hangouts, duo? Are these the same - what will gsuite users use wtf

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BonoboIO 4y ago

At this time it is a running gag that Google creates a messenger every one or two years. They have so much leverage with google accounts, gmail and android … pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world. But they achieved to even cripple Google Meets, a product that works. Unbelievable.

newsclues 4y ago
Failing to avoid antitrust issues if they succeed and become the dominant hub for online?
- rwalle 4y ago
  I don't think anyone antitrust is relevant at all in this discussion. Nobody would think that Google Talk/Chat/Whatever is remotely close to being scrutinized by government agencies.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  They „sponsor“ with x00 millions to exist. A competitor is great, because it avoids antitrusts like Microsoft had with IE.
raverbashing 4y ago
> pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world. True. It is frankly amazing how Google can't compete in that area They lack the vision. They lack the top-down mandate. They lack the will to centralize and push the effort. (see how most projects were experiments/things that "stuck"). I think one of the few times where Google successfully managed a global project to completion was Android? (and yet it was acquired)
hypothesis 4y ago
Current wisdom is that company exists to make money and everything is optimized for that. What if workers are fully onboard and working hard for next promotion? For products that are not money making machines like the ad biz, let them wither and start a new every couple years?

UweSchmidt 4y ago

Most comments are critical about Google's way of doing things, but maybe this is a good moment for an eulogy. Is anyone using Google Talk right now or has good things to say about it? Was it a place where you happened to have meaningful conversation? (Not me, but sometimes I'm nostalgic about internet places that came and went...)

civilized 4y ago
It would be great just to get an explanation of how people were even using it. Most users were kicked off Google Talk around 2013. Apparently third party apps were somehow allowed to continue using it.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  They weren't kicked off. It was just known to people that only used the web app as Hangouts.
Macha 4y ago
It was fine. I talked to some people in there, I plugged it into Pidgin as I did those days, it was nice that I could talk to other people using my own domain and later moved to other providers without contacts noticing. Because it was open I could use a generic interface to it, which was good for me as it let me shove it into the same app as MSN, YIM and AIM, but not so good for Google as it didn't make it particularly sticky, which I gather is why they shelved it for hangouts (though they did leave it's undead corpse shamble on)

eternityforest 4y ago

I just ignore any news relating to google communication services. Other than gmail, I just expect it to vanish in 18 months or less.

move-on-by 4y ago
Google Inbox was amazing. I was a huge Gmail fan, I had all sorts of automatic rules, and labels, etc- then I tried Inbox. All of a sudden Gmail became an unmanageable mess compared to the simplicity of Inbox. But of course, Google killed inbox. It was the exact thing I needed to get out of Google. I use my own domain email now and have switched between a couple different providers. Of course I still have my Gmail email- but it just forwards to my main email now. Other then for work, I’ve fully de-googled my personal usage of Google. All thanks to them showing me the glory of Inbox and then killing it. Thanks Google!
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Never heard of Inbox till now, but it looks like it was pretty cool. I wonder if you could make a clone of it that used normal gmail(Or whatever other provider, if you degoogled) as a backend?

remflight 4y ago

I have successfully migrated almost all my contacts off Google Chat to either Whatsapp or Signal. The only holdout is my wife. Everyone else agreed that Google Chat is the worst of the bunch and their product hasn’t changed or improved in years. I would love an explanation as to why this persists. Google has now become the place where products go to die and no one at Google seems to care. Nest is another company that hasn’t innovated or added significant new features in years. Same goes with Waze. Apple Maps is now the best navigation app because they have invested in innovation and for some reason Google won’t.

dasz 4y ago

So, talk is now done. Great. What's next? Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether. I'm sure I missed one.

krolden 4y ago
Phoneblocks
Markoff 4y ago
Just ignore any communication app coming from Google, it will be sooner or later killed.
gaws 4y ago
> Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether. You will use each one of them, and you will like it.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

I really had a Mandela effect here: I thought Google Talk had died a long, long time ago, having been replaced with Hangouts.

trashface 4y ago
I had the exact same response. Its hard to keep track of which chat apps google has killed and which are still alive.
encryptluks2 4y ago
Yes and no.. Google Talk is the same as Hangouts, but the name of their XMPP service that connected to Hangouts.

brightball 4y ago

Fwiw, Google Chat and Spaces, while not on the same level as Slack are definitely filling the “good enough to stick with” niche at a small company I’m helping now. If they actually commit to improving it, there’s real potential there.

zmmmmm 4y ago

I kept using Hangouts for so long because of one thing only: XMPP support. Even without federation it put Hangouts into a different tier of service. Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol. What a sad state of affairs to be in 25 years after we had dozens of interoperable clients / protocols in routine use.

stonecharioteer 4y ago
I used Miranda IM to chat with people on yim, msnm and gtalk all the time. It was amazing. Pidgin was good too. I miss that. I wish Facebook/Instagram chat, whatsapp and iMessage all supported XMPP.
justshowpost 4y ago
> Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol. Matrix

bradgessler 4y ago

Google has had so many variants of this that I don’t even know what they’re shutting down by just reading the headline.

agilob 4y ago
Let me help you, if you type `/hangout` command in Slack, it opens google meet...
- rrix2 4y ago
  And if you just type / and find that option in the list it's listed as a "Google+ Hangout"!
bborud 4y ago
If Google hadn’t been so obsessed with making messaging special (one way or another) they might have managed to make it good.
andrepd 4y ago
GChat, Talk, Duo, Meet, Hangouts... what did I miss?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Allo
  - Animats 4y ago
    Orkut.
    - lowdest 4y ago
      Wave
- morepork 4y ago
  Messages, Voice, Allo (rip) even Google docs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...

beachy 4y ago

I feel like my brain is now trained to skip over any Google chat-oriented product names or any information whatsoever about them simply because of the continuous churn. Instead I'm trained to just look for something that looks like a chat window and use that. I literally have no idea which one I actually use, nor whether this announcement affects me. I would love to know if inside Google there is any long term analysis of this. Is it just a series of teams getting accolades each year/quarter for Yet Another Chat Service? Or is someone taking the long view and evlauating just how much market confusion Google have spawned with this ridiculous never-ending saga?

bogota 4y ago
You are not alone in feeling this way. Hangouts was awesome and for a while my friend group tried to keep up with whatever googles newly pitched chat app was. We all just use WhatsApp now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

amachefe 4y ago

Loved Google Talk. Lightweight simple and does the job very well. Havent trusted Google after the moved off it.

miked85 4y ago

I didn't realize Google Talk existed anymore. Google has gone through at last a half dozen iterations of chat applications. I don't even know what the latest one is.