Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info.
Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem.
Then they removed browser support for anything but Chrome in Hangouts, initially promising to re-extend support, yet today the docs have changed to just say you must install Chrome.
The most recent eco-system tie-in that this article doesn't mention is Google Hangouts Meet. The corporate conference room version of Hangouts that has a different interface, custom Google hardware, and less memorable links (/xcf-fges-sce vs. /organization/meeting-name).
Pixel has similar limitations when it comes to screen mirroring, only a Chromecast will do for the Pixel! Yet other android phones freely connect to Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/etc all because of a hidden menu setting that Google has disabled and set to 0 by default. You must root your phone to get around it. Great flagship right?
All this points to a company that's so fucking worried that their tech is going to be outpaced by the little guy that they have to resort to handcuffing users to their wares. I've almost completely switched to Slack in the mean time.
Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features.
Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features).
I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.
==
* this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts
There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative.
Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.
On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS.
I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough.
How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group....
Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.
> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.
That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation.
As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine.
My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No.
For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app".
I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord:
Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint.
They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.
WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.
Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.
I really want Jabber to succeed, but it looks like all of the social providers don't want this and want to keep your communication on their servers.
Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and 128gb of ram to run each of them.
XMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging.
There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file uploads, end-to-end encryption etc. XMPP had a plethora of experimental XEPs with unknown support across clients and servers. And not much has changed in the past year.
So let's say you have the only client in existence that supports all these XEPs, Conversations for Android [2]. What can you do with it? Oh, you'd have to find a server that supports all your features and talk to people on the same client. And that's about it. For everybody else you're stuck with plain text messages.
It will only get worse for XMPP. AliChat and WeChat has long been the way to pay for anything in China, with over a trillion dollars flowing through their systems annually. Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram are busy adding payment capabilities to their platforms. It will be years before a relevant XEP is drafted, and another few years before maybe one client and maybe one server will start supporting it.
When they started pushing Duo and whatever the other piece of the associated current Google chat/conference... duopoly, is. Supposedly with some move away from and/or deprecation of Hangouts, not to mention the explicit language and dates WRT killing Talk.
Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is.
I just use non-Google stuff, now, for chat/video.
FB Messenger may be busy selling my soul, but at least it's still "Messenger" and actually fucking works. Which is why pretty much everyone has it installed and knows at least basically how to use it.
If I could just get my associates and friends to start using Signal or the like... (Of course, Signal could improve their UI a bit. NOT more fucking emojis, but instead making it very clear and easy to opt out of making it the default texting app (on Android). That is, not a big bar to opt in, with a little X within that bar to opt out. Tired of explaning that each time, to "normal" people, before they get back to me complaining that their texting doesn't look/work the same, any more.
P.S. As I recall now, that other piece is Allo.
If I even understand things correctly. I couldn't bring myself to read up on this thoroughly; I kept feeling the desire to throttle somebody.
P.P.S. And I remember when, a few years ago, they REALLY wanted everybody to move to Hangouts. Including integrating their SMS activity. Only, this had significant bugs, including aspects of data loss and the irreversibility of changing to their set up. That they seemed to have little real momentum in fixing -- or even communicating clearly upon.
I guess I should actually read the OP. But I'm not sure my blood pressure can take it, now.
Facebook Messenger Web is becoming unusable. Back in 2015 it was great, but slowly, they made it so that the website lags in all browsers if more than 100 messages are on screen, and the scrolling is now wonky.
The reason they "killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem" is because all the other messaging products had decided to move away from an open standard (XMPP/jabber) to proprietary protocols, so there wasn't much point in restricting Google's own ability to innovate around their chat product by keeping it tied to XMPP. We can argue whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't purely Google being a bad citizen.
Sure there were other and earlier offenders, but that doesn't mean Google had to follow suit. They could have contributed something open and federated - an upgrade to XMPP. Branding would have been easy and the darling of the web would have held that image a little longer.
But they didn't, the closing and interconnecting of Google's product ecosystem was the beginning of a trend which is now seen across most of their offerings:
The Pixel has silly restrictions as I mentioned. Android apps, Drive, Docs and the office suite apps have gone stale since they came out of beta and lack the commitment to open source that Google once championed.
Even their new HTML replacement, AMP, is heavily tied to Google resources, requiring entirely different implementations of the same experiences between the HTML and AMP versions further handcuffing the buyer to their ecosystem and the buyer's customers to Chrome.
Since October 30 2016, Hangouts is unusable on me on Safari.
I always use the pop-up feature in order to get individual chat windows that are real operating system windows, rather that the javascript windows in Gmail. Since that date, it doesn't work in Safari. It works for a few minutes, then the windows close themselves and disappear.
The only solution was to use Chrome... which worked until very recently. Now I get the same problem with Chrome too, albeit the timeout is much longer, perhaps an hour or so or sometimes longer.
Everything is fucked.
By the way, this is Apple bug 29018740. It might help if someone makes another bug report and references this bug, though I doubt it because when the latest Safari version was released (with the bug still present, of course), I mentioned this to Apple and they responded:
> Thank you for contacting us. If this is still an issue for you on current releases, please file a new bug report.
Thanks Apple.
By the way, this is just for text messaging. For voice/video Hangouts became unusable earlier than that. The video quality is approximately 120p and the audio is 1kbps or less, and I can't talk because noise cancellation doesn't work and I hear myself back with a 2 second delay and 80dB gain. Don't even get me started on CPU utilization yet...
Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond.
And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds.
And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.
I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.
The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on.
Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
Very US-centric view. In the UK everyone used MSN (well, people that actually used IM did) and now literally everyone uses WhatsApp. Even my technologically illiterate mum uses WhatsApp.
Did presence ever really work though? I’ve been online since the late 90s and I don’t remember ever considering it reliable except perhaps for people on IRC who I knew had a transient internet connection (namely dialup).
I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar).
It’s kind of funny, considering that presence is probably the most challenging technical requirement for large-scale messaging platforms. I will say that my two most-used messaging platforms, iMessage and Slack, both usually do a great job of delivering push notifications to only the ideal device (my phone, tablet, or computer). My intuition is that this logic is roughly the same as presence.
AIM handled presence quite well- custom "away" messages, easily editable "profiles" which were like a .plan file to include a note about where you were logged in, idle timers, icon to tell if an IM was forwarded to a cell phone. Finally while it lacked anything like Slack has to store your messages centrally and persistently, AIM would notify a user when you logged on to more than one location and allow remote logoff of your other sessions to ensure subsequent messages only went to your current session.
I'm glad you've been blessed with whatever Apple Magic lets iMessage work across devices for you but between my iPad iPhone and MacBook all I can say is I follow up important messages with a phone call because it's one of the more unreliable and indecipherable systems I've never been able to figure out.
That was never true. AIM was very popular in some places and had no foothold in others. In my area it was first ICQ and later MSN. Nobody, except one buddy from Seattle, used AIM.
IIRC, AIM required you to have AOL as your ISP. Even where applicable (i.e. in USA), this was still inconvenient until they dropped this requirement sometime in 2000. Other, ISP-independent messengers existed before, but the pastoral idyll of "everyone at the same chat network" never existed in reality.
In the business space, there was a consortium of companies/contributors that got together to try to solve enterprise messaging (not IM/person-to-person messaging, but messaging computers/message buses/queues/etc.)
That consortium created AMQP, which is a fucking abomination of a protocol. You can read through the spec and see the design-by-committee chimeric parts.
I'm not convinced that it's a good approach, basically.
It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms.
Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list.
I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another.
The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers.
As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare.
After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly, leading to ignored user feedback and a struggle make improvements.
The product mothballs for some years until - in the case of something like Google Talk - momentum is generated around replacing it with the next 1.0 product.
Writing really good software takes years of user feedback, and a team of knowledgeable engineers digesting that feedback to write new versions. A company can afford to do that when its users are its customers. When they are its product instead, you get a steady stream of half-baked and quickly-abandoned software, often installed via forced update.
It isn't exactly clear how it's managed from the desktop either. Over the years they've really screwed the whole thing up. It's no longer clear whether someone is online, offline, online but hidden, or just lost in a contact list change reorganization. it also isn't clear whether someone is available to chat, or if the IM I send will be inconveniently received on their mobile phone, something I try to avoid doing when possible.
What the hell is going on with groupware? IBM, MS, Google, are they all just befuddled by whatever web fad is current to forget making their stuff actually useful? I feel like there has been nothing but regression since 10 years, ever since Skype brought free and stable group calls.
Teams is an afterthought from Microsoft in its continuing lineage of Collaboration Applications.
We recently switched to it for a world wide support team and it's a step down.
- No direct quoting, only threaded replies in group chats.
- No linking to Threads, even though you can personally bookmark it
- No message indications except in 1 on 1 chats ad hoc chats, so if you're in a large group thread, you have no idea if someone is paying attention or not
- Poor UI decisions (the menu which appears over messages for "options/bookmark/like" will obscure messages if the same user sent two messages in a row; because it appears over the right-most part and the second of two messages from the same user doesn't include the user info, the menu will hide whatever's at the end of the message).
- Scrolling back in a message thread (group or personal) is pointless, as messages take so long to load, and it seems to load sequentially. (i.e., you can't just scroll to approximately where you think the message is; if you scroll for 10 minutes, it will still just load the most recent messages before continuing)
- Search has no proper way of search only one conversation, it's all or nothing.
- The mobile app is incredibly slow to sync regardless of whether it's on data or wireless.
I could go on for awhile on this. I honestly wonder if anyone at Microsoft even tried to use Teams before they released it, since everything about it feels like it was just tossed in there and the devs weren't allowed to look at what other collaborative chat apps did to make them good. Even their "me too" implementation of things like giphy integration or inserting photos in to the chat is very poor (dragging a photo from desktop will insert it into the thread, but dragging it from the web will upload it to sharepoint, though both take very long to upload). Accessing Sharepoint content takes a long time because Microsoft's login to the Office 365 space takes a long time. All text is actually rich text, but for some reason they included a pseudo markdown syntax which just toggles the rich text functions (bold, italics, etc) whether you mean to or not. You can't just escape these characters either since it's not that well thought out of a function.
When we briefly had Skype For Business, I thought that Microsoft couldn't do any worse, but they really did their homework for Teams and made a real horrible product that works for basically no one.
On Linux it does not even show the screen shared by others (Windows) users. In the old Skype (not for Business) client Linux users could even share. For corporations progress means removing working functionality.
Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.
> The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
You also cannot manage contacts in any app on android besides the contacts app, or, probably better for you: http://contacts.google.com
The rationale for Google's behaviour has always been that it will help them achieve user lock-in. But disregarding both the technical and ethical merits of this strategy... is it actually working for them? Six years ago I spent very significant proportion of my time using Talk and Reader. In their absence, I have shifted to using FB Messenger (/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc.), with Facebook and Hacker News kinda substituting for Reader. I still use Gmail and Google Apps, but my daily time inside the Google ecosystem has probably decreased by about 2/3rds.
If I'm their target audience, then this strategy is an unqualified failure. Obviously I'm not their target audience -- I'm an outlier in almost every respect -- but I've yet to see an analysis which suggested that Google has actually succeeded in capturing more eyeballs or generating more revenue via this strategy. In fact I haven't really seen any business analysis of this at all, other than blaming the business-types for making these decisions. Which is probably correct, but I'd still be very curious to see whether those decisions paid off, purely on their own terms.
I can relate to this. Google's services became less and less useful over time. I even replaced Hangouts with self-hosted XMPP server while previously I thought custom would mean a lot of trouble. After a while test driving it I migrated entire family (Conversations.im on Android works great and we've got encrypted E2E chats).
Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).
I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade.
Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction.
I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having a Gmail account either. I deleted it and ran my own mail server back in 2012. I use DavDroid/Radicle for contacts, so in the web interface, any contacts after 2012 that are SMS are phone number only. I have to use my phone to see the names.
I don't think it's even possible to find someone via gmail address anymore. Occasionally I'd find someone on Google Plus .. and have no freakin idea how the hell to send them a personal message (either in G+ or Hangouts).
The whole Hangouts/G+/Gmail ecosystem is awful. If you don't have a gmail account, it's beyond unusable. I pretty much just use Hangouts for legacy chats.
AIM/Yahoo/MSN all worked .. and now they're all gone (I think Yahoo is still there, but web only). Facebook was unreliable as shit and god awful until around 2013/2014. It took them that long to create someone their competitors had done better a decade ago.
Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.
Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk.
Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now strewn across loads of different chat apps.
These days I'm texting more again! This really isn't the future I expected.
That's been my experience as well. Facebook/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Allo/whatever might have amazing features but I truly don't care. SMS/iMessage (since it's seamlessly integrated) has completely taken over with my group of friends because of one defining feature - everyone has it. If you have a phone number, you can receive a text from me.
A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group thread we have and suggested moving to something "better". The group unanimously shot it down because we don't want to download new apps, create new accounts, then inevitably have to migrate to the brand new flashy service in 3 months.
For context, we're all late 20s/early 30s.
Edit: Actually, I believe SMS is still superior because it works even without a data connection. We spend enough time camping, skiing, attending huge sporting events, etc. any of those other services would be a significant downgrade.
I suppose you live in a country where the telcos offer free SMS. In Spain they cost money, so almost no one uses SMS for personal messaging. All the SMSs I get are from companies.
Certainly has a big plus - SMS will often get through when even voice can't. Data on the other hand! That's without getting into how badly some apps handle intermittent or no signal.
See, there's the devil, in the details as usual: "Have you [and everybody you wanted to talk to] tried the X [, all having tried it at the same time]? It's the best [when it works, unless it's subtly and invisibly broken, void where prohibited]."
When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike?
I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of "data" in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don't think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data -- they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs.
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said "We want the worst informed people to make the decisions" so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn't make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be "data driven" they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
I can't cover all the nuances of company meetings in a comment on Hacker News, and of course I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive, but I do think it can be healthy to tell meeting participants that it is culturally acceptable to advocate strongly, and with emotion, for what they think the right policy is.
Google seems like an example of how a "data driven" company can go off the rails. I'm not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on data, yet their brand image continues to decline.
And of course, I'm on the record in believing there should be less group meetings and more one on one meetings, at every company that I've ever worked:
Wow. That is a really apt critique of the culture you are describing.
It sounds like you're basically saying that as with programming styles, wellness, activism, and everything else in the world: there is a basis of truth that underpins data-centric management, but you can easily make it into a cult.
You put that idea together so succinctly - thank you.
I've migrated off Google services as much as possible over the last six months; I use Duck Duck Go for searches, and fastmail for email with my own domain. I also use the fastmail client's built in calendar. So far I've only had to fall back to a Google search a few times in six months, and the fastmail client is light years behind gmail inbox and gcal, but it's fine for my usage patterns. A year ago I was spending half of every day on a google service, now I barely touch them.
This seems to be a common and popular trend these days, especially on HN. Is anyone doing the opposite and becoming more ingrained into the Google ecosystem?
I'd love to dive more into the Android/Google side of things, but these sentiments are (unfortunately) making me think twice about doing so. I'd like to read different perspectives if they are out there.
What data are you basing the statement that Google's brand is in decline on?
Granted I'm by no means saying Google's messaging strategy is optimal, but it's not totally bonkers.
And the adage "you aren't the user" seems apt here. This applies both to the statement that Google's messaging tools are in decline, and to the statement that Google's brand is.
HN has been decrying google for years now, but he isn't your average consumer. Much as my extended family can all use allo and duo with ease, but I doubt my grandparents know what irc is.
I kind of think that it's difficult if not impossible to appeal to the broader set of people whole also appealing to the hn crowd. And, well, we're a lot smaller.
To loop back to your post, thats part of why data is so important. If you don't base your decisions, at least in part, on data, you end up designing a tool that's useful for you and not for your users. That's not to say that emotion has no place, but I think you're being disingenuous towards data here.
There is a running joke within Google that the best way to get promoted is to create another chat or video conferencing app.
Is it really a joke at this point, though?
Googler engineering leaders and teams engaging in the replacement of good chat tech with worse happens every year or two. All to demonstrate "cross-org impact" and climb the promo ladder. This is in fact the driving force behind many of the complaints mentioned in the article.
It really makes you wonder why there is no one in the organisation saying "This is a fantastic new product, with truly innovative work. Why did you feel the need to create an internal competitor to it rather than help make it better"
One of the most destructive issues I see from my time in management has been engineers who are more interested in re-writing what other people have already done. It seems amazing to me an organisation the size of Google hasn't identified the waste here.
Readit News
Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem.
Then they removed browser support for anything but Chrome in Hangouts, initially promising to re-extend support, yet today the docs have changed to just say you must install Chrome.
The most recent eco-system tie-in that this article doesn't mention is Google Hangouts Meet. The corporate conference room version of Hangouts that has a different interface, custom Google hardware, and less memorable links (/xcf-fges-sce vs. /organization/meeting-name).
Pixel has similar limitations when it comes to screen mirroring, only a Chromecast will do for the Pixel! Yet other android phones freely connect to Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/etc all because of a hidden menu setting that Google has disabled and set to 0 by default. You must root your phone to get around it. Great flagship right?
All this points to a company that's so fucking worried that their tech is going to be outpaced by the little guy that they have to resort to handcuffing users to their wares. I've almost completely switched to Slack in the mean time.
Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features).
I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.
==
* this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts
Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.
On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS.
I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough.
How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group....
Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.
That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation.
As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine.
My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No.
For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app".
I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord:
https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW
https://eul.im
It's only 90 KB (!)
Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.
They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.
Which has a horrible UX.
Personally, I use trillian to connect to facebook, jabber and others. But FB is always working hard to make that integration as bad as possible.
Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and 128gb of ram to run each of them.
There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file uploads, end-to-end encryption etc. XMPP had a plethora of experimental XEPs with unknown support across clients and servers. And not much has changed in the past year.
So let's say you have the only client in existence that supports all these XEPs, Conversations for Android [2]. What can you do with it? Oh, you'd have to find a server that supports all your features and talk to people on the same client. And that's about it. For everybody else you're stuck with plain text messages.
It will only get worse for XMPP. AliChat and WeChat has long been the way to pay for anything in China, with over a trillion dollars flowing through their systems annually. Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram are busy adding payment capabilities to their platforms. It will be years before a relevant XEP is drafted, and another few years before maybe one client and maybe one server will start supporting it.
[1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html [2] https://conversations.im
(I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)
Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is.
I just use non-Google stuff, now, for chat/video.
FB Messenger may be busy selling my soul, but at least it's still "Messenger" and actually fucking works. Which is why pretty much everyone has it installed and knows at least basically how to use it.
If I could just get my associates and friends to start using Signal or the like... (Of course, Signal could improve their UI a bit. NOT more fucking emojis, but instead making it very clear and easy to opt out of making it the default texting app (on Android). That is, not a big bar to opt in, with a little X within that bar to opt out. Tired of explaning that each time, to "normal" people, before they get back to me complaining that their texting doesn't look/work the same, any more.
P.S. As I recall now, that other piece is Allo.
If I even understand things correctly. I couldn't bring myself to read up on this thoroughly; I kept feeling the desire to throttle somebody.
P.P.S. And I remember when, a few years ago, they REALLY wanted everybody to move to Hangouts. Including integrating their SMS activity. Only, this had significant bugs, including aspects of data loss and the irreversibility of changing to their set up. That they seemed to have little real momentum in fixing -- or even communicating clearly upon.
I guess I should actually read the OP. But I'm not sure my blood pressure can take it, now.
Allo is a text chat app with lots of options for stickers and end-to-end encryption disabled by default.
I don't have a strong need for either of these apps.
But they didn't, the closing and interconnecting of Google's product ecosystem was the beginning of a trend which is now seen across most of their offerings:
The Pixel has silly restrictions as I mentioned. Android apps, Drive, Docs and the office suite apps have gone stale since they came out of beta and lack the commitment to open source that Google once championed.
Even their new HTML replacement, AMP, is heavily tied to Google resources, requiring entirely different implementations of the same experiences between the HTML and AMP versions further handcuffing the buyer to their ecosystem and the buyer's customers to Chrome.
I always use the pop-up feature in order to get individual chat windows that are real operating system windows, rather that the javascript windows in Gmail. Since that date, it doesn't work in Safari. It works for a few minutes, then the windows close themselves and disappear.
The only solution was to use Chrome... which worked until very recently. Now I get the same problem with Chrome too, albeit the timeout is much longer, perhaps an hour or so or sometimes longer.
Everything is fucked.
By the way, this is Apple bug 29018740. It might help if someone makes another bug report and references this bug, though I doubt it because when the latest Safari version was released (with the bug still present, of course), I mentioned this to Apple and they responded:
> Thank you for contacting us. If this is still an issue for you on current releases, please file a new bug report.
Thanks Apple.
By the way, this is just for text messaging. For voice/video Hangouts became unusable earlier than that. The video quality is approximately 120p and the audio is 1kbps or less, and I can't talk because noise cancellation doesn't work and I hear myself back with a 2 second delay and 80dB gain. Don't even get me started on CPU utilization yet...
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And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds.
And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.
Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".
The A in AIM stands for AOL. The A in AOL stands for America.
Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.
I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar).
It’s kind of funny, considering that presence is probably the most challenging technical requirement for large-scale messaging platforms. I will say that my two most-used messaging platforms, iMessage and Slack, both usually do a great job of delivering push notifications to only the ideal device (my phone, tablet, or computer). My intuition is that this logic is roughly the same as presence.
I'm glad you've been blessed with whatever Apple Magic lets iMessage work across devices for you but between my iPad iPhone and MacBook all I can say is I follow up important messages with a phone call because it's one of the more unreliable and indecipherable systems I've never been able to figure out.
That was never true. AIM was very popular in some places and had no foothold in others. In my area it was first ICQ and later MSN. Nobody, except one buddy from Seattle, used AIM.
It's a miracle that the web works the way it does. So perhaps we need a consortium (like W3C) for messaging too?
Otherwise, no matter what the committee does, it's doomed to fail because there is no incentive to support them.
And given that no one wants interop with their systems (except for some users, but who cares about them?), an interest group is unlikely to appear.
That consortium created AMQP, which is a fucking abomination of a protocol. You can read through the spec and see the design-by-committee chimeric parts.
I'm not convinced that it's a good approach, basically.
Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list.
I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another.
The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare.
After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly, leading to ignored user feedback and a struggle make improvements.
The product mothballs for some years until - in the case of something like Google Talk - momentum is generated around replacing it with the next 1.0 product.
And so on...
Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.
We recently switched to it for a world wide support team and it's a step down.
- No direct quoting, only threaded replies in group chats.
- No linking to Threads, even though you can personally bookmark it
- No message indications except in 1 on 1 chats ad hoc chats, so if you're in a large group thread, you have no idea if someone is paying attention or not
- Poor UI decisions (the menu which appears over messages for "options/bookmark/like" will obscure messages if the same user sent two messages in a row; because it appears over the right-most part and the second of two messages from the same user doesn't include the user info, the menu will hide whatever's at the end of the message).
- Scrolling back in a message thread (group or personal) is pointless, as messages take so long to load, and it seems to load sequentially. (i.e., you can't just scroll to approximately where you think the message is; if you scroll for 10 minutes, it will still just load the most recent messages before continuing)
- Search has no proper way of search only one conversation, it's all or nothing.
- The mobile app is incredibly slow to sync regardless of whether it's on data or wireless.
I could go on for awhile on this. I honestly wonder if anyone at Microsoft even tried to use Teams before they released it, since everything about it feels like it was just tossed in there and the devs weren't allowed to look at what other collaborative chat apps did to make them good. Even their "me too" implementation of things like giphy integration or inserting photos in to the chat is very poor (dragging a photo from desktop will insert it into the thread, but dragging it from the web will upload it to sharepoint, though both take very long to upload). Accessing Sharepoint content takes a long time because Microsoft's login to the Office 365 space takes a long time. All text is actually rich text, but for some reason they included a pseudo markdown syntax which just toggles the rich text functions (bold, italics, etc) whether you mean to or not. You can't just escape these characters either since it's not that well thought out of a function.
When we briefly had Skype For Business, I thought that Microsoft couldn't do any worse, but they really did their homework for Teams and made a real horrible product that works for basically no one.
On Linux it does not even show the screen shared by others (Windows) users. In the old Skype (not for Business) client Linux users could even share. For corporations progress means removing working functionality.
You also cannot manage contacts in any app on android besides the contacts app, or, probably better for you: http://contacts.google.com
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If I'm their target audience, then this strategy is an unqualified failure. Obviously I'm not their target audience -- I'm an outlier in almost every respect -- but I've yet to see an analysis which suggested that Google has actually succeeded in capturing more eyeballs or generating more revenue via this strategy. In fact I haven't really seen any business analysis of this at all, other than blaming the business-types for making these decisions. Which is probably correct, but I'd still be very curious to see whether those decisions paid off, purely on their own terms.
Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).
Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction.
I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having a Gmail account either. I deleted it and ran my own mail server back in 2012. I use DavDroid/Radicle for contacts, so in the web interface, any contacts after 2012 that are SMS are phone number only. I have to use my phone to see the names.
I don't think it's even possible to find someone via gmail address anymore. Occasionally I'd find someone on Google Plus .. and have no freakin idea how the hell to send them a personal message (either in G+ or Hangouts).
The whole Hangouts/G+/Gmail ecosystem is awful. If you don't have a gmail account, it's beyond unusable. I pretty much just use Hangouts for legacy chats.
AIM/Yahoo/MSN all worked .. and now they're all gone (I think Yahoo is still there, but web only). Facebook was unreliable as shit and god awful until around 2013/2014. It took them that long to create someone their competitors had done better a decade ago.
That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.
Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now strewn across loads of different chat apps.
These days I'm texting more again! This really isn't the future I expected.
A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group thread we have and suggested moving to something "better". The group unanimously shot it down because we don't want to download new apps, create new accounts, then inevitably have to migrate to the brand new flashy service in 3 months.
For context, we're all late 20s/early 30s.
Edit: Actually, I believe SMS is still superior because it works even without a data connection. We spend enough time camping, skiing, attending huge sporting events, etc. any of those other services would be a significant downgrade.
I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of "data" in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don't think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data -- they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs.
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said "We want the worst informed people to make the decisions" so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn't make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be "data driven" they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
I can't cover all the nuances of company meetings in a comment on Hacker News, and of course I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive, but I do think it can be healthy to tell meeting participants that it is culturally acceptable to advocate strongly, and with emotion, for what they think the right policy is.
Google seems like an example of how a "data driven" company can go off the rails. I'm not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on data, yet their brand image continues to decline.
And of course, I'm on the record in believing there should be less group meetings and more one on one meetings, at every company that I've ever worked:
http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa...
It sounds like you're basically saying that as with programming styles, wellness, activism, and everything else in the world: there is a basis of truth that underpins data-centric management, but you can easily make it into a cult.
You put that idea together so succinctly - thank you.
I'd love to dive more into the Android/Google side of things, but these sentiments are (unfortunately) making me think twice about doing so. I'd like to read different perspectives if they are out there.
Granted I'm by no means saying Google's messaging strategy is optimal, but it's not totally bonkers.
And the adage "you aren't the user" seems apt here. This applies both to the statement that Google's messaging tools are in decline, and to the statement that Google's brand is.
HN has been decrying google for years now, but he isn't your average consumer. Much as my extended family can all use allo and duo with ease, but I doubt my grandparents know what irc is.
I kind of think that it's difficult if not impossible to appeal to the broader set of people whole also appealing to the hn crowd. And, well, we're a lot smaller.
To loop back to your post, thats part of why data is so important. If you don't base your decisions, at least in part, on data, you end up designing a tool that's useful for you and not for your users. That's not to say that emotion has no place, but I think you're being disingenuous towards data here.
(Note:I work at Google, if that matters)
Is it really a joke at this point, though?
Googler engineering leaders and teams engaging in the replacement of good chat tech with worse happens every year or two. All to demonstrate "cross-org impact" and climb the promo ladder. This is in fact the driving force behind many of the complaints mentioned in the article.
A sad and systemic failure, indeed.
One of the most destructive issues I see from my time in management has been engineers who are more interested in re-writing what other people have already done. It seems amazing to me an organisation the size of Google hasn't identified the waste here.
There are apparently some moves afoot reforming the promo process to make this less common though. Here's hoping.