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And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to pre-Hangouts as well. It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a so

And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to pre-Hangouts as well. It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified. How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.

munificent 12y ago
You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze. These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it. Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago. If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
  - klodolph 12y ago
    Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.
criley2 12y ago
I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk. Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open. When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it 5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about). Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app... Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments. As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be... I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time. I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.
anigbrowl 12y ago
I've been using Picasa since version 1 but I disagree that G+ Photos is worse. I think the service has got quite a bit faster, smoother and easier to use over the last year.

munificent 12y ago

You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze. These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it. Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.

pessimizer 12y ago
You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago. If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
- klodolph 12y ago
  Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.

criley2 12y ago

I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk. Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open. When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it 5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)

AceJohnny2 12y ago
I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about). Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app... Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments. As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be... I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time. I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.

anigbrowl 12y ago

I've been using Picasa since version 1 but I disagree that G+ Photos is worse. I think the service has got quite a bit faster, smoother and easier to use over the last year.