7 ms·

It's sad because Google Talk was good. Jabber/XMPP on a web, for the masses. It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google even contributed J

by nextos 4y ago

It's sad because Google Talk was good. Jabber/XMPP on a web, for the masses. It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google even contributed JINGLE, a XEP (standard extension) for videocalls. I was making videocalls from Google Talk using a Nokia 770 in 2007. It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over.

acdha 4y ago
There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Excuse me, there was Wave.
- nerdjon 4y ago
  Reader really was the turning point for me personally. Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any of their products that made sense and I would jump in and try anything new. Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself from anything google.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Same. One of the big things I don't think their management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed towards people who influenced others — journalists, libraries, the family “tech expert”, etc. — and how forcing them out of something which worked into something which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g. Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand anywhere near as much.
    - MrPatan 4y ago
      Yes, Reader was Google's Twitter, in the way that maybe it doesn't make money but it can be used to put the right info in front of the right people. Throwing away that capability is demented. We were lucky, really.
    - nerdjon 4y ago
      Yeah I do think that was seriously under calculated. It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this. What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website. So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.
      - acdha 4y ago
        I’ve heard it brought up by C-level executives considering GCP. The business models are different but the idea that things will be cancelled has been well linked to the brand. My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
  Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically. Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.
  - acdha 4y ago
    There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it. Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Yeah, that was the weirdest part, period Forced increased followers + notification of every single one: creepy experience
      - acdha 4y ago
        Yeah, it was like something out of a cautionary short story. Cool, I know them. Oh, yeah, I haven’t talked with her in a while. Wait, who’s that guy? Huh, she responded to one Craigslist free stuff listing 3 years ago. Who cares? That’s the landlord we sublet from for 3 months a decade ago. … repeat for days … Make it stop!
  - epmatsw 4y ago
    The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  I was an intern at Google right around the time where Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team that was majorly impacted by that. It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all. And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Thanks for that perspective – your subjective impression certainly matches my outside experience. That seemed like the point where the halo faded.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      It didn't so much fade as that it got switched off. Suddenly Google was just another evil US corporation when before you might have had the impression that they meant what they said. To be fair to your comment: there were some earlier signs but they could all explained away in one way or another, but that time the mask fell and they never managed to put it back on again. Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.
  - gwillen 4y ago
    I was a fulltimer there around the same time, and I agree. I ended up quitting fairly soon after the G+ real names fiasco blew up, and it felt like a lot of internal "social capital" got burned on that, which was never really recovered. I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.
- rakoo 4y ago
  If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was supposed to take our communication to the 21st century
  - nfhshy68 4y ago
    Didn't Orkut actually have a good organic following in Brazil before they axed it for G+? So much stupid.
    - Sunspark 4y ago
      They did, it has always surprised me that they threw away a market they were leading in.
  - nl 4y ago
    Wave was never really pitched as a social network - although some people sort of talked about it like it was. It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.
    - rakoo 4y ago
      Oh sure, it wasn't a social network, but it was, like the GP said, the apex of what Google once was: innovation in the field with completely new, potentially useless, but ultimately eyes-opening tech
      - nl 4y ago
        It was pretty innovative, but it also showed such incredible hubris. The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it. The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2] [1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947
mtgx 4y ago
They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over. The only reason he's still CEO is that he's milked the Google brand for all its worth and has made everyone a shit ton of money. Other than that, the direction he's been giving Google, as a brand, has been terrible.
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
  To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.
  - leoc 4y ago
    Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".
    - tmpz22 4y ago
      One of those individuals also solicited sexual favors from his subordinates in the Google offices during work hours [1]. I don't know if we should put them on a pedastal. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees-masseuse-room-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives". People are not wrong to do so. Those two are not causing the problems. They can carry some blame for inaction, sure, but not that much of the blame.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT, etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech, especially in 2020.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I was a happy Google Talk user who had written a useful App Engine chatbot. It was really easy because App Engine had built-in XMPP support and each one had its own built-in address, so handling chat messages was even simpler than handling HTTP requests. But then Google stopped supporting XMPP from other domains (including their own domains) in their chat apps, which meant that I could only use my Google App Engine chat bot from non-Google chat programs, and that was a ridiculous situation.
sneak 4y ago
According to Google, approximately nobody used the federation capabilities of Google Talk except inbound spammers. It was absolutely not "for the masses". The masses all stay entirely within the censored and pruned walled gardens, then and now. It was all maintenance and antispam burden for no product benefit to users. Hackers vastly overestimate the desire of users to use federated systems.
- axus 4y ago
  How is Google's share of the chat market doing these days?
- hot_gril 4y ago
  This is how I feel when I get an SMS from an email address. There are 0 legitimate people who would message me that way. I have an entire rant on XMPP in some other HN thread, but basically I agree, chat federation is for nerds. And if XMPP wanted its federation dream to come true, the core standard (not including extensions) needed to be more rigid and keep up with the times. Instead, every sever ended up supporting a very different feature set, usually lacking things you'd take for granted in other chat apps.
- NPtzH9DW9Ejxxa9 4y ago
  Approximately nobody used the federation capabilities because approximately nobody used Google Talk... LOL In more seriousness, I know of quite a lot of people who chose to use Google Talk specifically because they could use it with their client of choice. (It also had a very wide reach for a while, thanks to its Gmail integration edit: and federation) I honestly don't know anyone else who used Google Talk (other than whenever they checked their Gmail they'd also see any messages in it). In other words, Google killed off the two reasons why people used it (edit: reach and choice of client). Since then they've "replaced" pieces of it with multiple different apps (Hangouts, Chat, Allo, Duo, Meet), some of which they're finally deciding to merge back together, and in the process all they've ever done (and all anyone expects them to do with this merger) is remove features. Usually exactly those features which were the only differentiation those services had from the competitors. Which means there's no difference from a competitor with a wider reach (Zoom, 100 different IM apps, iMessage/FaceTime, etc.). Which means it's doomed to be terminated (and probably reincarnated) by Google again in a few years. (Maybe there was even a third reason to use Talk: it was the IM with Google accounts. I don't think there's been One IM To Rule Them All from Google at any point since then.)
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over It feels Capitalist.
aceazzameen 4y ago
And it was simple and everyone had it in their Gmail. I used to use it with friends all the time! Then Hangouts and every rebranded disaster took its place. Since then we all migrated to Facetime, Zoom, Discord, etc. There was too much friction to follow Google's video chat decisions. This current headline just makes it easier for me to decide to never try their new products.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by nextos 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
Excuse me, there was Wave.
nerdjon 4y ago
Reader really was the turning point for me personally. Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any of their products that made sense and I would jump in and try anything new. Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself from anything google.
- acdha 4y ago
  Same. One of the big things I don't think their management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed towards people who influenced others — journalists, libraries, the family “tech expert”, etc. — and how forcing them out of something which worked into something which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g. Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand anywhere near as much.
  - MrPatan 4y ago
    Yes, Reader was Google's Twitter, in the way that maybe it doesn't make money but it can be used to put the right info in front of the right people. Throwing away that capability is demented. We were lucky, really.
  - nerdjon 4y ago
    Yeah I do think that was seriously under calculated. It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this. What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website. So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I’ve heard it brought up by C-level executives considering GCP. The business models are different but the idea that things will be cancelled has been well linked to the brand. My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
HeyItsMatt 4y ago
Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically. Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.
- acdha 4y ago
  There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it. Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Yeah, that was the weirdest part, period Forced increased followers + notification of every single one: creepy experience
    - acdha 4y ago
      Yeah, it was like something out of a cautionary short story. Cool, I know them. Oh, yeah, I haven’t talked with her in a while. Wait, who’s that guy? Huh, she responded to one Craigslist free stuff listing 3 years ago. Who cares? That’s the landlord we sublet from for 3 months a decade ago. … repeat for days … Make it stop!
- epmatsw 4y ago
  The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.
anyfoo 4y ago
I was an intern at Google right around the time where Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team that was majorly impacted by that. It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all. And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.
- acdha 4y ago
  Thanks for that perspective – your subjective impression certainly matches my outside experience. That seemed like the point where the halo faded.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    It didn't so much fade as that it got switched off. Suddenly Google was just another evil US corporation when before you might have had the impression that they meant what they said. To be fair to your comment: there were some earlier signs but they could all explained away in one way or another, but that time the mask fell and they never managed to put it back on again. Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.
- gwillen 4y ago
  I was a fulltimer there around the same time, and I agree. I ended up quitting fairly soon after the G+ real names fiasco blew up, and it felt like a lot of internal "social capital" got burned on that, which was never really recovered. I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.
rakoo 4y ago
If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was supposed to take our communication to the 21st century
- nfhshy68 4y ago
  Didn't Orkut actually have a good organic following in Brazil before they axed it for G+? So much stupid.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    They did, it has always surprised me that they threw away a market they were leading in.
- nl 4y ago
  Wave was never really pitched as a social network - although some people sort of talked about it like it was. It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    Oh sure, it wasn't a social network, but it was, like the GP said, the apex of what Google once was: innovation in the field with completely new, potentially useless, but ultimately eyes-opening tech
    - nl 4y ago
      It was pretty innovative, but it also showed such incredible hubris. The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it. The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2] [1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947

mtgx 4y ago

They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over. The only reason he's still CEO is that he's milked the Google brand for all its worth and has made everyone a shit ton of money. Other than that, the direction he's been giving Google, as a brand, has been terrible.

HeyItsMatt 4y ago
To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.
- leoc 4y ago
  Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    One of those individuals also solicited sexual favors from his subordinates in the Google offices during work hours [1]. I don't know if we should put them on a pedastal. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees-masseuse-room-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives". People are not wrong to do so. Those two are not causing the problems. They can carry some blame for inaction, sure, but not that much of the blame.
hot_gril 4y ago
What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT, etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech, especially in 2020.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

I was a happy Google Talk user who had written a useful App Engine chatbot. It was really easy because App Engine had built-in XMPP support and each one had its own built-in address, so handling chat messages was even simpler than handling HTTP requests. But then Google stopped supporting XMPP from other domains (including their own domains) in their chat apps, which meant that I could only use my Google App Engine chat bot from non-Google chat programs, and that was a ridiculous situation.

sneak 4y ago

According to Google, approximately nobody used the federation capabilities of Google Talk except inbound spammers. It was absolutely not "for the masses". The masses all stay entirely within the censored and pruned walled gardens, then and now. It was all maintenance and antispam burden for no product benefit to users. Hackers vastly overestimate the desire of users to use federated systems.

axus 4y ago
How is Google's share of the chat market doing these days?
hot_gril 4y ago
This is how I feel when I get an SMS from an email address. There are 0 legitimate people who would message me that way. I have an entire rant on XMPP in some other HN thread, but basically I agree, chat federation is for nerds. And if XMPP wanted its federation dream to come true, the core standard (not including extensions) needed to be more rigid and keep up with the times. Instead, every sever ended up supporting a very different feature set, usually lacking things you'd take for granted in other chat apps.
NPtzH9DW9Ejxxa9 4y ago
Approximately nobody used the federation capabilities because approximately nobody used Google Talk... LOL In more seriousness, I know of quite a lot of people who chose to use Google Talk specifically because they could use it with their client of choice. (It also had a very wide reach for a while, thanks to its Gmail integration edit: and federation) I honestly don't know anyone else who used Google Talk (other than whenever they checked their Gmail they'd also see any messages in it). In other words, Google killed off the two reasons why people used it (edit: reach and choice of client). Since then they've "replaced" pieces of it with multiple different apps (Hangouts, Chat, Allo, Duo, Meet), some of which they're finally deciding to merge back together, and in the process all they've ever done (and all anyone expects them to do with this merger) is remove features. Usually exactly those features which were the only differentiation those services had from the competitors. Which means there's no difference from a competitor with a wider reach (Zoom, 100 different IM apps, iMessage/FaceTime, etc.). Which means it's doomed to be terminated (and probably reincarnated) by Google again in a few years. (Maybe there was even a third reason to use Talk: it was the IM with Google accounts. I don't think there's been One IM To Rule Them All from Google at any point since then.)

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over It feels Capitalist.

aceazzameen 4y ago

And it was simple and everyone had it in their Gmail. I used to use it with friends all the time! Then Hangouts and every rebranded disaster took its place. Since then we all migrated to Facetime, Zoom, Discord, etc. There was too much friction to follow Google's video chat decisions. This current headline just makes it easier for me to decide to never try their new products.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]