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Google Talk Is Being Discontinued
- mindcrime 9y agoXMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be supported starting June 26. Fuck you, Google. Just fuck you...
- jkarneges 9y agoParent shouldn't be downvoted. Depression and/or rage are among the valid responses to this part of the news.
- zokier 9y agoThe writing on the wall for this has been up for a long time. Raging for something that has been so predictable is not reasonable, there has been plenty of time to plan for this contingency and act accordingly.
- mindcrime 9y agoCalling this "rage" is probably overstating the situation a bit. Strong annoyance is probably closer to the truth. But you have to understand, I'm something of an ideologue when it comes to open standards, open source, etc. So this really sticks in my craw.
- thrill 9y agoI wish someone at Google would explain their overarching strategy and target. This piecemeal approach just reeks of no coherent plan.
- maverick_iceman 9y agoI doubt they have any coherent strategy in the messaging space.
- zokier 9y agoThrow shit on the wall and see what sticks? Isn't that what pretty much everyone is doing?
- bigkm 9y agoOnce it sticks and everyone is using it, then shut it down
- vocatus_gate 9y agoIt's sad but true. I can hardly trust any Google products any more because you never know when they're randomly going to give it the axe for no apparent reason.
- rhizome 9y agoThey don't appear to have much of a coherent strategy in the product space.
- keymone 9y agoHow about coherent strategy within a company?
- yeukhon 9y agoWell, it is not a big secret on many occasions people tell the outsiders Google would have multiple teams working on the same, if not, similar product, only to find just one will launch publicly, and then 6-24 months later the service will shut down.
- ballenf 9y agoIf you remember whose Google's customers are--advertisers, not users--coherency is a lot easier to understand. So it's really easy to predict Google. Just ask the following questions: - can Google run ads to every user of the product? - can Google extract usage data to build a better user profile, in order to charge more for above ads? The answer with regard to Talk or any interoperable service, is almost always no to both. The incoherency we see is related to the fact that not every engineer or manager at Google is fully plugged into the above or sometimes they create a product that fails to answer the above with the hope they'll figure that out later. Sometimes the nature of the product or the fact that it's an open standard makes it impossible to evolve the product to get the questions right. I loved that I could use my native Mac messaging app to communicate with colleagues in google chat. It was real-time and all messages were logged and available in gmail. I guess that's going away.
- remir 9y agoI agree. Where is Sundar? Larry? Sergueï?
- sah2ed 9y agoA googler already summarized their strategy succinctly up-thread [1] as: Google is a feudally organized collection of fiefdoms and this shows in their product strategy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13951918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13951918
- martin1975 9y agoyep, and neither Larry nor Sergey are strong, commanding personalities like Jobs was w/Apple - they're mega geeks, good at what they do, but at the level of the game they're playing, they need a firmer vision/hand to manage the direction of the company... and remain open at the same time instead of building walled gardens. They're slowly turning into Apple....
- zekevermillion 9y agoSeriously, Google owes me $50 for my obihai router I bought solely for free google integration. This is the problem with building anything on top of Gsuite -- they will screw you over at a random moment and deprecate whatever service you may have been relying on.
- pgrote 9y agoI think it'll still work, right? Google Voice is still supported.
- Danihan 9y agoDon't give them any ideas..
- radiorental 9y agoI think this relates to apps that utilise gtalk. Obihai is integrated with gVoice. Is there something I'm missing?
- zekevermillion 9y agoOK, if they still support XMPP for Gvoice then I am an idiot and I take back my comment. There was a threat awhile back that they would remove XMPP support for Gvoice (and thus I would have to pay for a service to use with my obihai). But that seemed to have gone on the back burner for awhile.
- radiorental 9y agothanks for the clarification.
- accountface 9y ago>owes me >solely for free google integration Dude, you get what you pay for
- 9y ago
- lousken 9y agotime to switch to matrix I guess
- jkarneges 9y agoGoogle doesn't support the Matrix protocol either, unfortunately
- vidarh 9y agoBut seeing as we can't trust Google to keep supporting their own stuff from one moment to the next, nor can expect their own services to interoperate with each other, perhaps we shouldn't particularly care which protocols Google supports.
- lousken 9y agoI meant stop using google for communication for good, even if they'd supported it, they could drop the support any time
- rsoto 9y agoI'm sorry, I'm not really into chat protocols, but what does XMPP federation mean? For what I understand I will be able to login via Pidgin into my Gmail account, but not from a custom domain, am I right? Either way, GTalk was such a clean, centered and small IM experiencie +10 years ago, Hangouts is just a mess.
- jkarneges 9y agoFederation is where different service providers can communicate with each other, like how email works. Meaning, you could login to Gmail (whether gmail.com or custom domain) and send messages to users with accounts on non-Gmail IM providers (practically speaking this meant hobbyist, corporate, or university IM server deployments; Google was the only major consumer IM provider to adopt a federated protocol). The shutdown is unfortunate news because the only way IM is going to be as open as email is if two major consumer providers step up and do it. We had 1 and just needed 1 more. Now we have 0.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoI believe that at one point a Google chat user could talk with a facebook chat user.
- martin1975 9y agoFederation means not having to reinvent the chat wheel for the umpteenth time.... Who was that quote from - physicists stand on the shoulder of giants... software and IT stand on each other's toes. Sad but true.
- ISL 9y agoApropos? https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications
- jkarneges 9y agoIndeed! Much different leadership back then: Service choice is something you have with email and, for the most part, with your regular phone service today. [...] Unfortunately, the same is not true with many popular IM and VOIP networks today. [...] The Google Talk network supports open interoperability with hundreds of other communications service providers through a process known as federation.
- pmilot 9y agoWelcome to The Cloud, where you basically void all rights for long-term support of any product.
- cpburns2009 9y agoThe only benefit I see out of this is the removal of SMS support in the Hangouts Android app. I like my communication channels separate. I don't like Hangouts or Facebook Messenger wanting to control my cell phone messages (SMS). This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?
- smt88 9y ago> I like my communication channels separate. You could always keep them separate, if you wanted to. This feature was totally invisible to people who left it turned off. I personally want to have all my messaging in one place, which used to be possible. Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how each person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app, find their name, and then message them. It's incredibly frustrating to have a worse 2017 messaging experience than I did in 2007 with my BlackBerry. > This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts? Chat in Gmail is Hangouts.
- Chaebixi 9y ago> Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how each person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app I think this is true to an extent, but I think messaging isn't as simple "get this text to this person." Different communications channels have different contexts, implied importance, etc. Making them too unified papers over and confuses those social differences. For instance, it would be super weird if a coworker texted me instead of IM'd me about some everyday work thing.
- jooize 9y agoWe should solve that within the same protocol. Allow multiple named conversation streams for any combination of contacts with an interface to filter them (private, work, dating, family). I also want priority of messages to let the receiver handle them differently (low/normal/high). Default ‘normal’ and changeable within reach, but quite invisible. Anyone can then let me write a ‘high’ priority message that makes noise in the middle of the night, or if I suspect they're resting and I want to send a cat picture I'll use ‘low’.
- lotso 9y agoI still use Gchat over Hangouts because it's nice seeing my contacts list sorted by who is online, as opposed being ordered by recency of last communication. So many of my Gchat conversations have started because of the online status. I've hit up friends that I haven't talked to in over a year and had really great, synchronous, conversations because of it.
- jrullman 9y agoIt sounds like that will continue to be possible — "Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1 chats."
- mtgx 9y agoI remember there was a rather big outrage when Google first released Hangouts and it showed everyone as online all the time. Eventually, they made it so you only show-up as online if you've been in the window in the past 15 minutes. But they're still not ordering the contacts by online status. This is just one more of those "social" things that Google has never been able to grasp.
- TorKlingberg 9y ago"online" as a concept has become a bit meaningless with mobile clients.
- cptskippy 9y agoThis is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way. People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with people you didn't log into your IM client, if you wanted to chat with someone specifically there was a first class UI element for setting your status so you could tell others to leave you alone. Email and SMS were black holes where you only knew if your message was received via a response. Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM someone. Read receipts are standard so you know if someone got your message. If someone's phone rings while you're eating, you're lucky if they apologize before answering, and you've won the lottery if they excuse themselves from the table. It seems like we're all just sitting around waiting for an interruption to distract us from the life in front of us. Idk... you damn kids need to get off my lawn.
- pgrote 9y agoA couple of questions concerning this announcement. 1) With the removal of SMS from Hangouts on Android does anyone know if this affects SMS in Hangouts on ChromeOS? 2) Is retiring a euphemism for killing in terms of Google Labs additions or does this mean they will still work, but won't be made available to new users? Thanks.
- ouid 9y agoGod damn it. I do not want to use the Google Hangouts experience. Talk is a simple, elegant chat application. That is all I require and all I desire from Google. And I do not want to be patronized about how I actually want more "integration" with google products.
- ceejayoz 9y agoHangouts is solid proof that no one at Google uses the multiple account support. If they did, it wouldn't be so awful. I click a hangout link for a work call and get "no one in the call". I have to add authuser=1 to the URL manually to see that it's actually that I don't have permission to it.
- james_pm 9y agoThis. Happens all the time and then people say, "You never showed up." The authuser=1 tip is great. Thanks for sharing that!
- X-Istence 9y agoAt the bottom, in tiny font, there is a "change account" link that gives you the ability to switch that call to a different Google account. It's tiny, you might have missed it...
- ceejayoz 9y agoSure, but it's silly that it's required, and the "no one here" is hugely misleading. Google knows which accounts I'm logged in as. They know which accounts have access to the meeting. If I'm logged in as one of these accounts, why not do it automatically for me?
- partiallypro 9y agoThis happens to me on GSuite all the time, I actually stopped using it and just call in a separate conference line. I would show up, usually first to the meeting, and it would just sit and say no one is around. Then I could logout, log back in and I'd see everyone else was suddenly there. I missed 2-3 meetings at my newest job because of this. This is the paid version of Google too, absolutely not acceptable. My old job had Office 365 and I long for it, it's just not as competitively priced for SMBs.
- smdz 9y agoGTalk was an amazing simple-to-use application. Should I say it was simpler than Skype. I don't like hangouts at all.
- ouid 9y agosimple, elegant, compact, cute emojis, and my preferred method of communication for more than a decade.
- Liuser 9y agoTheir Chrome plugin was also wonderful. Keyword "was". It used to be a discreet window that persists across tabs, which you could minimize and expand from the lower right corner of your screen. They killed it and now it's an awful behemoth google hangouts window. Really disappointing.
- wykydtron 9y agoIt's like designed for legally blind or touch screen and the green makes me want to vomit
- Denvercoder9 9y agoYes, I loved the old Hangouts extension. By far best experience of any IM app I've used (and that's a lot, unfortunately).
- krackers 9y agohttps://github.com/dhleong/hangr https://github.com/dhleong/hangr is a really neat replacement. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much longer hangouts as a whole is going to last (didn't they say they were discontinuing it from consumer space?)
- startupdiscuss 9y agoI just had an image of myself posting the headline: "Google discontinues Gmail and Search" as a way to kickstart a conversation about our reliance on services, and whether we can blame companies for not subsidizing services we like and so on. But then I realized it would just go sideways into a discussion about click bait and appropriate headlines, so I am posting it as a comment.
- yitchelle 9y agoWhen Google Talk is discontinued, folks will gravitate to the next IM message like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or even Twitter DM. Gmail, well there are other client to use. Search, umm, what can we do here? DuckGoGo?
- startupdiscuss 9y agoI agree with you. Do you think Google has a moral responsibility to provide us with tools and time to make the transition? And, how good do the tools have to be? Just a text dump is okay, or should you be able to give it your credentials and it can do the transfer? And then who decides how many services it should make easy? Are we being responsible now by not thinking about it?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wykydtron 9y agoA lot of my friends that are friends with me on FB for some reason prefer DMing me on Instagram... Such a weird trend, but it's honestly a thing amongst our group. Either that or Snapchat group chats.
- vocatus_gate 9y agoSame here, weirdly enough. In order of most messages exchanged per service, in my friend circles it goes: 1. WhatsApp 2. GroupMe 3. Instagram DM 4. SMS 5. FB Messenger 6. Wickr
- hprotagonist 9y ago>XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be supported starting June 26. What does this actually mean?
- WorldMaker 9y agoXMPP Federation allows servers to talk to each other similar to how email works, and which is why XMPP addresses have always looked like email addresses. Up until June 26 you could (with some effort) run a server on your own domain and still chat with people on Google's XMPP servers.
- geofft 9y agoWhat does this mean for the ability to search Hangouts conversations from the Gmail "chats" label? As far as I'm aware, there's no native search in Hangouts itself (e.g., https://hangouts.google.com https://hangouts.google.com ).
- tlogan 9y agoBut they also mention that Hangouts API will stop working [1]. Which is kinda strange: if Hangouts is the new thing then why to shutdown the API? I'm asking this more from a developer perspective: lets suppose one wants to integrate their app with google "chat / collaboration" systems (like one can integrate with Slack, Facebook, etc.). What to do? I have feeling that Google executives are thinking something like this "lets just buy Slack and call the day". What are you thoughts about this? [1] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3002204/google-is-shutting-down-hangouts-api-as-it-lures-consumers-towards-allo-and-duo http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3002204/google-is-s...
- scrollaway 9y agoHere's what I don't get about Google. A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead. Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and lightweight chat app, right in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the time! Google has failed to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones? So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and they used their Android market share to do that. People didn't like it, still used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because everybody's gotta reinvent the wheel. You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything. Who's making these decisions exactly? Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it's honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord (https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/) for essentially all my communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms tech, even as an open protocol). It's proprietary, but at least it gives me text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn't suck - and there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.
- shmerl 9y agoNot just failed. Google betrayed XMPP. You can blame Eric Schmidt for it. He gave some lame speech about how other instant messaging services aren't playing fair, so Google should also become a walled garden. And that was it. They made Hangouts and stopped caring about federated IM idea. It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever. And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose. People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.
- ThrowLikeGoogle 9y agoI'm just going to type LOL and see what happens All the context for the LOL has been provided with great previous discussions that have happened on HN on many/frequent Google kills So here it goes... L-O-L
- wnevets 9y agoAka their best chat client. Instead of having one great chat platform they now have several not so great clients.
- wykydtron 9y agoAllo, Duo, Android Messages, Hangouts, Gtalk. Oh you have 3 Gmail's because you've been an Android YouTube and Google Apps user since 2010? Good luck with that nightmare, we'll get all your personal and business contacts all jumbled together!
- cptskippy 9y agoI just figured out I could access my hotmail inbox from outlook.com using my Microsoft Account credentials associated with an email address setup through Google Apps using a custom domain. It was full of spam.
- draw_down 9y agoThey should just keep a constant URL that will redirect you to whatever is their current messaging/calling product of the day. Jeez.
- vidarh 9y agoThat'd be a bit like http://www.uroulette.com/ http://www.uroulette.com/ - you'd never know where you'd end up.
- shmerl 9y agoI'm pretty upset at Google about how they handled IM. It basically cost me more than a half of my contacts (who use Google), since first XMPP federation with Google Talk stopped working when Google refused to support server to server encryption, and now it's being dropped altogether. So much for moving things forward, instead of falling into the dark ages of incompatible balkanized instance messaging services.
- marssaxman 9y agoThat decision basically killed instant messaging for me. I miss it, but there just isn't any critical mass anymore. I could run half a dozen different messaging apps, each one reaching some subset of my friends, most of whom are never available anyway, but the old situation where it was easy to keep in touch with people via chat just doesn't exist anymore.
- shmerl 9y ago> That decision basically killed instant messaging for me. I feel the same way.
- smelendez 9y agoI think instant messaging also worked better in the PC era, when you knew people were active, "away" or altogether offline. The messages I want to send or receive with a phone notification are a lot different from the ones people would exchange in the old days of IM.
- math0ne 9y agoI use pidgin, how does this affect me?
- ajross 9y agoIf you use Pidgin to connect to an XMPP federated service, then that won't work any more. If like basically everyone relevant, you use Pidgin to directly chat with Hangouts users and to hang out on IRC (the federated protocol that actually succeeded in the marketplace), then you don't care. I genuinely don't understand the outrage in support of XMPP. It didn't work out guys. IRC tuns out to be all anyone actually wanted, and to the extent that's not true, it would have been eaten by Slack anyway.
- peapicker 9y agoYou didn't see this part in the article? > "Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1 chats."
- arrty88 9y agoAs part of our continued effort to focus Google+ around shared interests, we’re retiring two legacy Google+ features in Gmail: the ability to email Google+ profiles and the use of Google+ Circles. (Expected: No earlier than April 24, 2017) Whaaaat? Emailing profiles was the most useful part of g+
- accountface 9y agoGood. They should kill every chat app except for Hangouts and merge functionality. They're losing a lot of points with customers with the "have 10 teams make 10 apps that do the same thing and slowly kill off support before discontinuing" model.
- bahmboo 9y agoThis is for G Suite business customers. They don't explictly say if this applies to regular Google users.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThis is more likely regarding the fact that Google is obligated to warn their paying customers, and not obligated to warn their products. If these services didn't tie to G-Suite, there'd likely be no warning at all.
- ungzd 9y agoThis blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more not mentioned here): - Google Talk - Hangouts Meet - Hangouts Chat - Android Messages (something new, never heard of it) (And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS). How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.
- petepete 9y agoAndroid messages is the (renamed) default SMS app for Android. It's actually fantastic, beautifully designed, responsive and lightweight.
- netsharc 9y agoBut Facebook Messenger now wants to eat Snapchat's lunch and is offering Snapchat functionality. Great, that annoying cat lady who I'm "friends" with now can spam my Messenger app with pics of her cat. And I shared a picture with a friend and Messenger suggested I posted it to it's NotSnapChat. It's a single button inside the chat bubble, which makes me wonder if the publishing happens directly when I push that button, and who'll be the next Anthony Weiner after he accidentally presses that button...
- smelendez 9y agoI've thought about this, too. All the chat and social network tools are constantly shifting their UIs and naturally, I guess, trying to highlight new features, which on a tiny phone screen is equivalent to making them easy to accidentally click. The worst I've done is accidentally send a Facebook "thumbs up" in an inappropriate context, but it's easy to imagine how you could do much worse.
- delecti 9y agoI downloaded Facebook Messenger Lite and highly recommend it. It strips out everything except... well... Facebook Messenger. I can message people, and there's none of the extra UI crap, including their Facebook branded Snapchat copy (not to be confused with their Instagram or Whatsapp branded Snapchat copies). Officially it's only supported in emerging markets, but you can download it from apkmirror and it'll install just fine.
- grabcocque 9y agoRemember the first law of Google services: if it's not useful to sell you better to advertisers it's not useful.
- eachro 9y agoAt this point I have no idea which Google chat client is which. A few years ago I remember having Google Talk on my android phone. Then after some random update the application disappeared from my phone and was replaced with hangouts. Now is Google Talk the same as GChat? Was Hangouts anything more than just a new branding for Google Talk? I have no idea. And what's up with this Google Allo thing? Again, it seems like Google seriously dropped the ball with branding and communicating wtf was going on. Most of my messages has moved over to FB Messenger or Whatsapp/Wechat and Google only has itself to blame for that.
- jdoliner 9y agoI'd say google has entered into a post modern era of chat. I don't think there's anything they could announce that would actually mean something to the generally public, there's too many overlapping brands with overlapping functionality.
- vocatus_gate 9y agoThey're like the 1980's GM of chat products right now: too many overlapping products cannibalizing their own userbase.
- mkhpalm 9y agoI mostly agree, but there is one thing that end-users are dying for. Truly federated chat services and open standards. Its the only thing that anybody could do differently to really stand out above the rest.
- vidarh 9y agoAll I know is that every now and again I notice a bunch of notifications of missed conversations in Gmail, sorry Inbox, or maybe it was in Gmail, and once again swear and tell people it's a bad idea to try to get ahold of me that way because odds are it will take ages before I see it. I'll never trust a Google messaging app because of that mess, and frankly I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Gmail/Inbox too and will probably move off it soon.
- 9y ago
- aclimatt 9y agoCan somebody please explain to me Google's messaging strategy? As a Voice, Talk, Hangouts, SMS user for what feels like the last decade, I am so incredibly confused that I want to walk into Google and fire all 18 of the 19 messaging teams. That way at least we'll have one singular group to yell at when things go wrong. Here's the Google Messaging landscape as far as I know it: - Google Talk in Gmail: I think this is what my work account has, and what they're shutting down: http://imgur.com/Z0v6Zjq http://imgur.com/Z0v6Zjq This one is pretty useful because you can initiate a new Hangouts Video call right from this interface, as well as open up the Google Talk Voice POTS Dialer (?) - Google Hangouts Messaging in Gmail: I think this what my personal account has, and perhaps what's sticking around? http://imgur.com/dBf7me2 http://imgur.com/dBf7me2 This interface clearly got upgraded a bit, but removed the ability to create a new Hangouts Video call unless you're initiating it with a specific person (or I couldn't find the place to do it) - Google Hangouts for Android: This is a dual Hangouts and SMS client that supposedly will send messages with the two services above ^, plus over SMS to your carrier contacts. This is also being discontinued? - Android Messaging: Sounds like a new app that's coming out which will replace the SMS side of the above existing Hangouts app - Hangouts Chat: This is the new app that's going to replace the IP-based messaging feature of the current Google Hangouts for Android, right? - Hangouts Meet: This is the new app that's going to replace the video and screensharing portion of Hangouts for Android it sounds like. Why these two are now separate apps is beyond me. But it sounds like these two will interoperate with Google Hangouts in Gmail (the second screenshot), and the first one is disappearing and/or being converted into the second. OK, I think I'm staring to figure this out... - Google Voice: Oh don't get me started on Voice. I've been a Voice user forever, and we finally got an upgrade! Which made no sense, because I thought they were killing it? But now they're not? So now Voice is purely for SMS-based communication, and would be an alternative to Android Messaging, just as it always was (with its new web client as well). But if you were one of the unlucky people who chose to integrate your GVoice SMS experience into Hangouts for Android, I guess you can still use that? Supposedly that's still supported, but I didn't, and I fear for whoever ends up with that experience... - Hangouts Dialer for Android: This is / was the POTS dialer that integrated with Hangouts, and allowed you to dial any POTS number over VoIP. AND it lightly integrates with Google Voice, because it uses your GVoice number and balance for international calls. BONUS: It can also /receive/ inbound calls that are placed inbound to your GVoice number, OR from Google Talk, because "Google Talk" was considered a "forwarding phone" as as Voice was concerned. Is that part going away? Can you "call" people over GTalk now? Sounds like no, but you can still "Hangouts Meet" with them, and if you have the Android client, it will ring your phone? I guess that makes sense... What about inbound calls to your GVoice number and being able to answer them over VoIP? That works today, and it'd be a real bummer if it went a way. - Google Allo: Hey remember this? Probably not even though it's only less than a year old. This is an entirely separate walled garden of a messaging app that allows you to Allo (text chat) other Allo users. But it also DOES have an SMS bridge (surprise!), and you can Allo non-Allo users, however the receiving SMS end is still a little questionable and is more meant as a user-acquisition funnel than a transparent GVoice-like experience. I believe this was meant to be a WhatsApp clone, but nobody uses it. - Google Duo: And then there's this thing? I guess it's almost identical to Hangouts Meet now? Maybe Hangouts Meet is for Business® users and Duo is for your friends and family? Maybe Duo uses voice recognition to censor all business communication? (That was a joke, but...) It's just that simple! Screw Google and whoever is running their messaging division. Except I think that's the problem: nobody is. Which is why this post exists. I still think Wave could have solved all of our problems...
- tmaly 9y agoFor them its a very smart move, if its a non-core part of the business that is not generating revenue, it makes sense. From a user perspective, it is a bad play. Just like Google Reader, there were users that relied on the software. While it may save them money, it hurts them in other ways.
- peapicker 9y ago"Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1 chats." For me, this means it basically still exists and my user experience is the same.
- bigbugbag 9y agoSomehow this 1-on-1 chat has stopped working circa 2013 for me. People using google still show up as online in my contact list but do not ever receive my messages. On the other hand I do not appear in their contact list anymore.
- zeveb 9y ago> we’ve evolved Hangouts to focus on two new experiences > Google Talk launched in 2005 as a simple chat experience To quote Inigo Montoya, 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.' > As part of our continued effort to focus Google+ around shared interests, we’re retiring two legacy Google+ features in Gmail: the ability to email Google+ profiles and the use of Google+ Circles. Sad to see Circles die — that's what was compelling about Google+. I don't even know what it is now.
- zeveb 9y agoWhy's this getting downvotes? I think that calling software & features 'experiences' rather than 'software' and 'features' is a symptom of precisely what's wrong with Google's current direction.
- thekevan 9y agoMy first thought was, "wait, which Google chat app is that?"
- nawtacawp 9y agohttps://pbxinaflash.com/community/threads/r-i-p-google-voice-again.21208/#post-129739 https://pbxinaflash.com/community/threads/r-i-p-google-voice... "Looks like June 26 may be the final curtain call for Google Voice. Google today announced that it's finally pulling the plug on Google Chat upon which Google Voice relies on the Asterisk platform."
- jameskegel 9y agoYou're quoting the comment of a guy taking his sources out of context. The G suite article he uses as a source doesn't contain the word Asterisk nor Google Voice
- discreditable 9y agoGoogle Voice will live on in some form via Project Fi. They make efforts to hide it, but Fi is very Google Voice-y. It even conflicts with Google Voice associated with the same Google account.
- berberous 9y agoCan anyone explain why if I switch to upgraded Hangouts I see only a few online contacts, but in the old Google Chat I see a bunch of people available and online? It's a serious regression and will cause me to stop using chat in gmail for the most part.
- triplenineteen 9y agoI'm not 100%, but I think this has to do with a Hangouts setting: "Show when you were last active". If that is unchecked, it means that some users (some clients?) will always show you as offline.
- erpellan 9y ago"Collaborate on standards. Compete on quality" Or something, I'm probably butchering the quote. There's a reason we can play CDs from any manufacturer in every manufacturer's player. Likewise SD cards, VHS videos, DVDs... The importance of working with your competitors was well understood in the 1980's. Seem's it's a lesson we need to learn again: https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-and-win https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-an...
- 1_2__3 9y agoGood analogy. I was thinking of this the other day - while technically the big players are in standards committees together and do work on common standards, in practice it's a bunch of corporate maneuvering that bears no resemblance at all to things like the kind of things Sony, Toshiba, Onkyo, Panasonic and other big players do when they decide they want to accomplish something. Can you imagine Google, Apple and Microsoft regularly forming cross-team working groups to specifically develop technology and associated standards to be adopted by all? They're too busy suspiciously eyeing each other's userbases to waste time on anything like long-term strategic thinking that benefits anyone but themselves. To be honest it feels like that kind of collaboration is long gone - it came about because it was necessary to actually serve consumers. But while someone who purchased a Compact Disc player is a Sony customer, a person who uses chat is not a Google customer - they're a SKU. The whole way the Internet tech industry is structured is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you wanted to encourage collaboration. By making users and their data a commodity instead of customers there's no benefit at all to improving their general experience.
- remir 9y agoWell, The Alliance for Open Media is a step in the right direction. You have Cisco, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Netflix all on board to work on the AV1 open video codec as an alternative to HEVC. This is great and we need more of that.
- sixdimensional 9y agoFor that matter, competitors collaborating often runs afoul of government regulations... EXCEPT, for in this case when competitors collaborating directly benefits the public.
- donatj 9y agoI've never understood that Hangouts… wasn't Google Talk? I still don't exactly understand.
- wykydtron 9y agoGoogle's marketing department.... Ugh... Gmail (for your website) gets renamed to Google Apps, then rebranded to Google Apps For Business. Then they throw that out the door and call it "G Suite "G Suite for Business" and "G Suite for Enterprise" - killing me Google... I mean Alphabet...
- Animats 9y agoThey also want to destroy SMS, converting to "RCS messaging powered by the Jibe RCS cloud from Google".
- plg 9y agoI'm really not being a troll here, I'm just confused: Google Talk : what is that? Is that the little box on the left hand side of the page on gmail that lets you chat with other gmail users? Google Hangouts : different? I know it's videochat but it also has text ... a different thing? The Android/Google phone chat app thingy --- is this different still? obviously I'm not a regular google user at least not of these services
- arkitaip 9y agoWe're all confused and whiny wrt to Google's consumer products.
- kilroy123 9y agoWe all don't know. They have confused everyone with their messaging apps.
- Pxtl 9y agoHangouts was until recently, a combined videochat/IM/sms app for desktop and mobile, tied to your google account. If you had a Google Voice service account, it could also be used to send SMS messages from the desktop. But then Google decided they didn't want Hangouts to be that anymore, and are stripping out features to focus it as the "corporate" messenger while they split its functionality into three different Android apps - Allo, Duo, and Messages. So now Hangouts is just a desktop/mobile videochat and IM. No more SMS. And they have a "consumer-oriented" pair of voicechat and IM apps in Duo and Allo. But they're not compatible with Hangouts so if one user uses Hangouts and the other one uses Allo, they can't communicate directly. Google has gone mad.
- notatoad 9y agoI'm confused too. Wasn't Hangouts initially billed as a replacement to Google Talk? I remember my Google Talk chrome extension being replaced automatically by a hangouts extension one day. I thought they discontinued Talk years ago.
- sbd01 9y agoA few years ago, Google integrated a messaging service called Google Talk into Gmail. It was "the little box on the left hand side", as well as a mobile app. A few years later, Google rebranded Talk as Hangouts with a few new features, but for some inane reason left Talk available as a hidden option for those who wanted to use it over Hangouts. Then, just because they felt like it, Google decided to integrate Google Voice, an online phone and text service, into Google Hangouts. This allowed you to make calls or send texts from the Hangouts app to regular phone numbers. To make matters even more confusing, Hangouts also served as an SMS app preinstalled on Nexus phones, which allowed this one app to send texts using Hangouts, Google Voice, or SMS. Because Google has an unhealthily short attention span, they then decided to create an SMS-only app, which was intended to replace the SMS functionality of the Hangouts app. It seems that Google forgot they still had SMS functionality within the Hangouts app until now, and are finally removing it. One would hope that was the end of it, but Google just couldn't make up its mind and released two new messaging and video calling apps, Allo and Duo respectively. Nobody knows what these are for, since Hangouts already has both of these features. They brought nothing new to the table and now are mostly unused. We can only hope that Google decides to focus on one product sometime in the future, but that seems optimistic. For now, Hangouts is their priority, but I imagine that they'll be releasing a new messaging platform in the next year or two.
- brooklynmarket 9y agoWe're actually talking to Google. If they don't up their game with their Alexa like device, AKA Google Home, it's next on the chopping block. Big disconnect there. She sounds like a robot, development tools are really a fraction of what Amazon offers. The sales revenue is so high for their click model, their best minds are working on how to get people to click on ad's for shoes. Needs a shake up at Google, for sure. It's time. Maybe everyone having to pass their fabled "white board" coding interview is leaving creative minds behind? Everyone just knows the best way to do a binary sort, and not much more. That's my thinking.
- adtac 9y agoNot really relevant, but there's no binary sort :P
- vowelless 9y agoFor a second I thought they were discontinuing Google voice and almost panicked as my main number is my Google voice number. Actually, has anyone migrated away from Google voice to a better service ? I would be willing to pay a little bit.
- yeukhon 9y agoI too. GV has been a great product for me espeically I get to use it to numbers within the U.S.
- LTom 9y agoI’m getting really fed up with Google. Yet another time when they nudge me towards using a service, only to retire it a while later. A separate app for SMS again , just when I’m comfortable with centralizing it in Hangouts. And Allo and Hangouts aren’t compatible, right? Every time I jump on Google’s newest app bandwagon it seems to end up being another ephemeral thing.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoThis may be a little dramatic, but I feel like I have to say it. Everything is ephemeral. Google's problem is that they don't keep services around long enough nor do they plan a reasonable migration strategy for when they shutter them.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoEphemeral is okay. But having three (four? I honestly don't know) competing services from a single provider and playing "guess which one's the evil twin" is shitty.
- tiglionabbit 9y agoI miss Google Hello.
- LTom 9y agoYeah, there’s: * Allo (text chat) * Duo (video chat) * Android Messages (SMS etc.) (And Google Voice also does SMS iirc) And of course Hangouts, which is able to do all of those currently, but is going to be split up into different business-oriented apps for some reason. If Allo and Duo had just been another client for whatever protocol Hangouts uses these days, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But like it is now, I don’t feel like I can ‘rely’ on Google at all. Facebook Messenger has been a far more stable experience, even though I have some reservations about it.
- Markoff 9y agomaybe learn a lesson and stop jumping to newest apps as good rule?
- Steeeve 9y agoAll this discussion about what the future is in the messaging space... The future is disarray, just like the present and just like the past. IM isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve, even at scale. (and certainly not at startup scale) It's not a good advertising medium, and nobody will ever spend significant money in that space. It's an add-on feel good service.
- yeukhon 9y agoIM isn't easy to solve, but it really is. All you need are * commitment * nice UI * nice add-on services Putting Skype's privacy and issues aside, it has proven to be a very successful IM product for the past decade. Slack, HipChat are more geared toward developers / tech workers. IRC is probably one of the oldest and still widely used because of its simplicity (once you know how to use it, it's easy to use) If you merge all of them together, and have a real product team to support the product forward, it won't be hard. Of course, if your goal is to integrate with 20 other services, yeah, you will run out lucky hitting someone's walled garden.
- makecheck 9y agoSometimes I think they named themselves Alphabet, Inc. so that they can have 26 different versions of a product, one for every letter of the, er, alphabet. Their executives need to get on a whiteboard and make a few simple mandates, such as: 1. There will be a single protocol for messaging across all Google properties, compatible with open protocols where feasible. 2. There will be a single “app icon” on Android, and single app on each major platform, for achieving communication. All legacy messaging services will be available from this point. 3. Every reasonable handle for identifying users will be supported, including: profile names, E-mail addresses, real names, and legacy messaging user IDs. 4. Effective immediately, every single team working on every Google chat product will report to Foobar McManager, whose compensation will depend directly on achieving integration goals by $DATE.
- chatmasta 9y agoI honestly couldn't even tell you which google service "google talk" is. It's amazing how incompetent their product teams are.
- Balgair 9y agoColor me surprised, yet again. At this point, even gmail's continuity is suspect. What can you trust Goog with these days? Maps is awful unless you want a hand-warmer on the slopes, Wave went kaput, now Talk? Are they trying to ruin my trust in them?
- martin1975 9y ago...and this is why I no longer use any chat clients from Google... WhatsApp and Viber connect me to more than half the planet, and SMS, shitty as it is, works with just about everyone in the world. For everything else, we have email or file sharing.
- Markoff 9y agoi agree with second half about SMS and email, but WhatsApp owned by Facebook is big no no and Viber isn't that popular, so i keep Signal and Skype Lite personally i would not mind if we would use email as chat, there are already clients able to do that, it would solve lot of problems
- UnoriginalGuy 9y agoI've been avoiding Google Hangouts because when it first shipped you had to sign up to Google Plus. Does anyone know if that is still the case? I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years due to the Google Plus requirement there also.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago> I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years due to the Google Plus requirement there also. Same. I purposefully stopped reviewing products on the Play/App store as soon as they forced you to use your G+ profile. Why on Earth does my real name or main profile need to be associated with a short app review?
- joshstrange 9y agoGoogle's failure to produce a service/system/ecosystem around chat is astounding to me. Google Chat was around well before HipChat, Slack, Gitter, etc and yet they came in and ate Google's lunch. At work we use HipChat but we pay for Google Apps for email/drive/etc. It's crazy that Google Chat and Hangouts suck so much.
- jwilk 9y agohttps://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/
- skdotdan 9y agoUnveiling Google Chat: a new messaging app from Google, that will coexist with Voice, Talk, Hangouts, Allo and G+ Messenger m, and eventually be canceled.
- js2 9y agoThis change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS. Project Fi users who wish to use Hangouts as their SMS app will also not be impacted by this change What kind of sense does that make? Does this mean that Voice and Fi users can't use Android Messages for SMS? And what about MMS?
- z3t4 9y agoHow do you manage to keep up with the latest messenger fashion ? I gave up when people changed from MSN to Skype. Then they changed to Facebook and now they are probably using Whatsapp or some other I don't know of. When I want to chat I use IRC. And I've also setup asterisk as a SIP server for voice calls.
- Markoff 9y agoi still use Skype, specifically Skype Lite is quite nice, so that's one option for video and chat, other option for video, chat and SMS is Signal and if neither of them works for you, you can always email me or call me used wechat because lived in China, but uninstalled everything Chinese after leaving that place, tried Facebook messenger (later Lite) for few months until decided i don't really need to have Facebook account and anything to do with Facebook, which means i ain't gonna install WhatsApp either, so there are not many other options left
- ereyes01 9y agoBoy, do I regret giving so many people my GV number and using it as a main phone number... They are also removing Hangouts' SMS integration, BUT: > Note: This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS. That doesn't really make me feel great, it's only a matter of time before it changes again, and I'm quite sure the experience of staying in Hangouts will be awful in the meantime. This whole SMS + Hangouts + GV situation is such a clusterfuck, yet I feel a bit trapped in this ecosystem right now due to the stickiness of a phone number that family already remembers, and numerous business cards I've handed out. I know they recently polished up the old GV app, but the FB Messenger + Whatsapp ecosystem looks so much nicer now... I wish I can just somehow hand them my GV number and leave this Google mess behind... or somehow redirect everyone to my carrier number.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoThere is the Google Voice app.
- Declanomous 9y agoI'm thinking about porting my GV number away from Google, if that is even possible. Voice used to be the best thing ever, but now it has a shadow of it's original functionality.
- rrdharan 9y agoIt is possible. I ported my T-Mobile number into GV in 2013 when I switched to Android and Hangouts first added GV/SMS integration, so that I could send SMS from the desktop. Then I ported my number back out to T-Mobile again in 2015 when I switched back to an iPhone and regained iMessage.
- dhd415 9y agoI'm pretty concerned about their commitment to Google Voice functionality, too. I'm so invested in that ecosystem that I don't even know what my carrier number is anymore. I'd happily pay money for the service, but I don't think Google is interested in a subscription model for it. Does anyone know of third-party products with similar functionality? I dread the thought of having to figure something out on short notice.
- WithHighProb 9y agoLOL years ago someone in mainland China copycat ICQ. Now the company he founded is known as Tencent.
- g9 9y agoSo, this is just funny to look how ad company with a lot of $$$ is playing with its toys and throwing it away as soon as it is already boring.
- tlow 9y agoAt what point are they going to cancel google voice to force us into hangouts. The recent redesign makes me think not immediately, but initially with the G+ pushes they've held back functionality simply to force G+ products.
- X86BSD 9y agoI have come to loathe Google. Android is a tire fire mess. It's UI is horrible. And as bad as that is I have google fiber tv and that UI is even worse. Google does NOT get UI. Everything short of gmail that they have tried to make work has failed. They don't innovate. They create short lived products that bring in no extra ad revenue. Google is ripe for being replaced. It's big but so was MS. You may love Google to death. I think they are a company with no vision, no innovation, and are milking the ad revenue teet. Someone is going to replace them.
- spronkey 9y agoYep. I'd also mention how many viable alternatives to Google products and services they have shuttered because Google offer theirs "for free". They have an almost-monopoly on the advertising space, their resources and size make it difficult for others to compete with them, and they treat their users like dirt. Wait sorry, they don't have any users, they have products. And they treat those like dirt.
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- Pxtl 9y agoLosing SMS from Hangouts is the bigger deal for me. I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user experience. I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as a hub - every chat system logs their history for a given contact into their contacts app, so I can open up a contact and see every communication app (even multiplayer games) and an interlined history for them all? That would make this work. I could take the SMS, the chat, voice, even the dialer off the home screen and just have contacts - even a shortcut to my wife, so I could just open a person and then open a communication app for that person. That would work. But without that, having a zillion small communication apps does not provide a good experience because the android home screen is a bad shell for lots of small apps. It's just a launcher that's good for big monolithic ones.
- neogodless 9y agoThat was the joy of Windows Phone 7 which slowly got pulled back through 8/8.1/10. You used to be able to view a Contact and see all their profiles and communication histories in one place. But then they started to "part things out" and disassemble that goodness.
- isaiahg 9y agoWhen did Hangouts lose sms? I still send sms messages from it daily.
- Pxtl 9y agoFrom tfa: imminently.
- Markoff 9y agowell you can have all of it with Skype (Lite) or Signal (no dialer though), which are actually only two messaging apps i use since i left Facebook Lite and don't wanna use other Facebook product called WhatsApp, I am fine being reachable on Skype, email, SMS and Signal, I think enough options for other people
- gtirloni 9y agoAt this point it would be better if they would just discontinue Talk, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, etc, etc, etc and focus on a single communications app. Give them a 6 month deadline and for the love of God, have a single app that I can use for chat, voice and video.
- Markoff 9y agowhy insist on using Google products and not switch to Skype (lite) or Signal?
- gtirloni 9y agoThat's a good question. Despite the awful UI, Skype serves me very well and I think they are improving quickly on Linux. The problem is none of my friends/family use it. Some have it installed but they always use something else for chatting. Nobody I know uses Signal.
- Markoff 9y agostrange, nobody i know use Google to chat or video call, some members of our family use Viber, i convinced few to Signal so they can talk to me, pretty much everyone has Skype but most of the people use it just on desktop and then when I would ask people around everyone use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but Google communication apps are pretty much dead here around me in Europe somewhere slightly higher than Signal but much much lower than Skype in popularity BTW what is so awful about Skype Lite interface? a bit more cluttered than Viber, WhatsApp or Signal, but still ok compared to Messenger nobody has problem with judging by popularity
- gtirloni 9y agoIt's not that everybody here is using Google apps. They aren't. They all use WhatsApp or FB Messenger. But those options are terrible to me (particularly because desktop clients are bad or non-existent) The reasons I hope Google gets their act together is because they are in the right place to do so. They have the mindshare, just need to execute better and network effects may kick in. It also doesn't matter if they have the best platform but none of my friends/family use it. Again, Google is better positioned to make that happen, IMHO. I don't know what Skype Lite is. I use Skype for Linux Alpha. Is that it? It seems to be missing video calls, the chat interface is complicated (spent some time trying to find the chat while in a voice call), it doesn't integrate well with the desktop (it minimizes when I close, instead of hiding in the tray). Like I said, they are improving. As for Signal and converting people to some technology I know is better... Sorry, tried that too many times. It's not worth the time invested. These companies will have to figure out how to increase their market share without depending on tech enthusiats.
- dbg31415 9y agoI was terrified when I first read this, I thought it was "Google Voice" but then I realized it wasn't... and couldn't for the life of me picture what Google Talk was since... we have Google Hangouts and couldn't tell you the last time I even saw "Google Talk" anywhere.
- csours 9y agoDoes anyone have a timeline of Google messaging app changes?
- maverick_iceman 9y agoMaybe they make promotion decisions based on new product launches, incentivizing multiple products over the unsexy work of maintaining old ones.
- microcolonel 9y agoI still wonder why we can't just do IM over SMTP. There's already tonnes of volume, the latency is basically good enough, and the format has lots of room for progressive enhancement through the addition of parts and formats. As someone who administrates a small SMTP peering group with a friend, I'm constantly baffled by the reinvention of the wheel. Presence could be easily signalled by messages which degrade gracefully. i.e. send a human-readable email that says you're online or offline, with a presence header verified by DKIM/SPF/DMARC, or you could even revive Finger. Use whatever protocol between the mailserver and the client.
- bigbugbag 9y agoSomeone did make an instant messaging over email thing recently, but I can't remember its name and searching for instant messaging over email is quite a haystack.
- edpichler 9y agoThat's why I think twice before adopting a Google Product. Google Talk was really good, I miss a simple communication app like it was. The best I ever used, on my opinion.
- mads 9y agoIts like Google is becoming a Javascript framework.
- tehabe 9y agoThe worst news in this announcement by Google is that "Quote Selected Text" in Gmail will be retired, it was essentially the only lab feature I used, I even got used to. I'm sad to see it go.
- bunnymancer 9y agoIt's weird when Apple has the better messenger app.. Even more so when they got into that position without actually changing anything..
- sunyc 9y agoThis is mostly towards g suite enterprise offering.
- xnx 9y agoLike many, I'm supremely confused about this history and current state of Google's various chat systems. Does anyone know of a comprehensive timeline of all the various permutations? I would read it just to boggle at how many poor decisions could be made by a single company in a single category.
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- hkdobrev 9y agoOK, Google Talk was a dead man walking for some time now. Even if it's not a nice decision for open standards at least they made a final decision whether they are either improving it or killing it. However, Google have completely lost their mind with messengers. GTalk, Hangouts, Messages, Messenger, Allo, Duo, Chat, Meet. Some available only on mobile. Some supporting SMS, some working only with SMS. Allo having G assistant in chat, G assistant is only with voice on their pixel phone. The tipping point was when both Hangouts and Messages competed to handle my SMS messages and when Hangouts won because of Gmail integration, they removed SMS from it. They really need to get it together.
- vidyesh 9y ago>G assistant is only with voice on their pixel phone. What do you mean? Google Assistant is now available for almost every Android device, it has replaced Google Now and can be invoked like you invoked Google Now before.
- Markoff 9y agothe real question is why you keep using them instead of let's say Signal or Skype which can both handle video, chat and SMS, Skype even dialer
- prodmerc 9y agoAnd no one gives a shit. Just like Google+, it can be gone tomorrow and no one (in their right mind) will miss it.
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive dismissals here, especially rude ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drawkbox 9y agoName a Google product that isn't search and gmail that hasn't been discontinued after n years. Google drive might hang around, and probably Google Cloud (though it was mainly AppEngine for a longtime only). But there is little faith in any Google platform if you are planning to build on it. I am still pissed about Google Reader.
- williamle8300 9y agoIs anybody surprised anymore when Google shutters a project? It's almost like their calling card.
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- bythckr 9y agoGtalk was a great product like Google Reader. Google is just proving how unreliable it is as a company. I have ditched by Gmail account before they ditch me. Same with Chrome too.
- nojvek 9y agoGoogle wants to be like Apple. Lean and mean but it's got a big problem. They want to release and try new things but also still be focused on the big money makers. That means expect a lot of crap from Google like wave, allo, duo, buzz etc. Some hotshot inside Google wants a promo and pushes new products like popcorn. But Google management needs to show $$$ so they need to focus on the big cows: search & ads. In Steve Jobs era a ton of shit would never even see the light of day. Google literally has so much money and resources that it actually hurts them innovating. Their best strategy is to acquire products with good market fit and scale the shit out of them.
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- smokedoutraider 9y agoIt seems like Google is constantly trying to simplify and streamline everything for developers and giving a big middle finger to the users.
- Markoff 9y agoand meanwhile I use for communication email, SMS and Skype longer than these Google products, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber and Wechat exist only thing I have added is Signal because why not have one more messenger if it's bundled with SMS anyway when living in China was forced to use Wechat but got rid off that spyware immediately after moving outside, them had short stint with Facebook Messenger (Lite) until I decided it's not worth to do any business with Facebook which is reason why I don't have WhatsApp I think I provide enough options for people to reach me with email, SMS, Skype (video/chat), Signal (video/chat) so in the end i have 4 apps in phone covering all my communication - AOSP Email, AOSP Dialer, Skype Lite and Signal