3 ms·

Recent anecdote: My parents and brother were on WhatsApp and were trying to get me on it. I tried to get them on Hangouts instead since we all had it on our pho

Recent anecdote: My parents and brother were on WhatsApp and were trying to get me on it. I tried to get them on Hangouts instead since we all had it on our phones already. So I convinced dad to try it with me. He wanted to send me a pic. Right away Hangouts on his phone said something about how sending pics required G+, but maybe he could skip that step, or not, we couldn't figure wtf was going on. So now we're all on WhatsApp (and I love it). It just worked right away. I can see in my crystal ball that Google's downfall will be: - attempting to passive-aggressive force everybody into their G+ world. - making every Google service so dependent on other services (namely G+) that every simple task will be interrupted by some sort of "Would you like to join G+.." edit: formatting.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
Try Telegram. My whole network (20+ people) have already dumped Whatsapp for it.
- mentaat 13y ago
  is telegram really a non profit group? are they trying to be wikipedia of messaging?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Supposedly, yes: https://telegram.org/faq https://telegram.org/faq They also have an open API and documented protocol. I was a WhatsApp subscriber, and I'd pay for Telegram.
  - OGC 13y ago
    They are bankrolled by vkontakte.
- brandon272 13y ago
  What convinced your whole network to switch to Telegram? Privacy concerns?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    It's free (for now), identical to Whatsapp (drop in replacement), but most importantly, its not owned by Facebook. I'm really, really, really tired of major companies (Facebook, Google, etc) fucking up messaging (Hangouts anyone?). I emailed everyone in my Whatsapp contact list, asked them to switch. It only took 48 hours. Already uninstalled Whatsapp from my phone.
    - OGC 13y ago
      Telegram is owned by vkontakte, so you're trading facebook for the russian version of facebook.
vertex-four 13y ago
Google+ suffers from the fact that it refers to two different things. One is an identity system - your Google+ account is your identity. The other is a social network, which your identity is tied to. The thing is, because of the "your Google+ account is your identity" perspective, it seems obvious from the point of view of Google's developers that all their social services should depend on it. But from everyone else's perspective, they don't want to sign up for a new social network.
- teleclimber 13y ago
  That's a good observation. I never thought of it that way.
- saurik 13y ago
  Google already had a shared identity / profile mechanism that all of their products used (or migrated to after acquisition) (with the exception of YouTube, though you could tie your YouTube account to your Google account and log in via Google still anyway).
daemin 13y ago
This sort of integration of everything reminds me of Microsoft, where they seem to want to integrate everything, sometimes this worked out well and sometimes it didn't. Internally a lot of it makes technical sense - reuse of existing libraries, services, components, thus lowering of support and development costs - but on the outside it just looks like vendor lock in.

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Try Telegram. My whole network (20+ people) have already dumped Whatsapp for it.

mentaat 13y ago
is telegram really a non profit group? are they trying to be wikipedia of messaging?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Supposedly, yes: https://telegram.org/faq https://telegram.org/faq They also have an open API and documented protocol. I was a WhatsApp subscriber, and I'd pay for Telegram.
- OGC 13y ago
  They are bankrolled by vkontakte.
brandon272 13y ago
What convinced your whole network to switch to Telegram? Privacy concerns?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  It's free (for now), identical to Whatsapp (drop in replacement), but most importantly, its not owned by Facebook. I'm really, really, really tired of major companies (Facebook, Google, etc) fucking up messaging (Hangouts anyone?). I emailed everyone in my Whatsapp contact list, asked them to switch. It only took 48 hours. Already uninstalled Whatsapp from my phone.
  - OGC 13y ago
    Telegram is owned by vkontakte, so you're trading facebook for the russian version of facebook.

vertex-four 13y ago

Google+ suffers from the fact that it refers to two different things. One is an identity system - your Google+ account is your identity. The other is a social network, which your identity is tied to. The thing is, because of the "your Google+ account is your identity" perspective, it seems obvious from the point of view of Google's developers that all their social services should depend on it. But from everyone else's perspective, they don't want to sign up for a new social network.

teleclimber 13y ago
That's a good observation. I never thought of it that way.
saurik 13y ago
Google already had a shared identity / profile mechanism that all of their products used (or migrated to after acquisition) (with the exception of YouTube, though you could tie your YouTube account to your Google account and log in via Google still anyway).

daemin 13y ago

This sort of integration of everything reminds me of Microsoft, where they seem to want to integrate everything, sometimes this worked out well and sometimes it didn't. Internally a lot of it makes technical sense - reuse of existing libraries, services, components, thus lowering of support and development costs - but on the outside it just looks like vendor lock in.