Besides the fact that this is a pretty serious bug, I'm rather underwhelmed by the care Google has been taking of their hangouts product after releasing it last May.
And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts.
As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well).
Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either.
When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved.
Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform.
Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning. It also loses message regularly so I am now used to ask for copy pasting if it's obvious something got lost.
Blatant disregard of things like sorting via status (or displaying that at all) or introducing more of them is another thing.
It looks like some crazy manager designed his evil plan and convinced all his bosses that it's the way to go. The app sucks, everyone I know hates it, they forced feeded it to users with Android update with no way to go back to gtalk.
It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done.
Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead.
/rant
> Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead.
I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
I've noticed the same thing with Apple's Messages. Sometimes messages arrive on my phone, sometimes on the Messages application on my laptop, sometimes both. Even when a message arrives at both locations, there's often a significant delay between the arrivals.
It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
> Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning
I use it every day and don't think i get anything like this issue (for balance)
Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.
So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now.
Just one use case for online statuses.
Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.
Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.
So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
You're forgetting the worst offender: the old Gchat let you tab through the input boxes of the different chats. On Hangouts, tab just cycles you through every UI element on the page.
To be fair,that's the proper behavior the tab key on a desktop, and breaking from that is breaking the standard behavior. Offering a hotkey makes sense, but tab isn't it.
Oh god, the notifications. There doesn't seem to be any intelligent targeting for them. Whenever I receive a message, every single client I have gets notified regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm actively typing into my android hangout client, chances are my tablets and my gmail tabs don't need to beep to let me know there's a new message.
> At this time Google Talk is not functioning correctly and we are continuing to work to restore full functionality.
This is where you turn it off until you fix it. This isn't a service disruption, this is a service malfunction with far more serious potential consequences than delayed emails, or inability to download an app, or duplicate credit card charges, and you can't fix those consequences after the fact, not even by applying vast amounts of money.
I think they turned off Hangouts and reverted to old talk. I noticed that messages I've tried to send with Hangouts from G+ web page were not delivered and chats from gtalk dekstop client are saved in gmail as "chat" not "hangout"
Maybe this explains why us people that link our SIP to the PSTN via Googlo Talk haven't been able to do so for the last 18 hours or so? Maybe they are attempting to figure out what they can safely turn off/revert.
Edit: A bit of reading says that this probably is unrelated...
Was about to create a thread on /r/netsec and ask what was going on, or if i had gone crazy, after a former colleague of me got everything i wrote to my fiancee.
Releasing is hard to scale up like google have to. How many apps are they releasing to daily...!
It's not technical building blocks (they can all be automated), not even busy work, just complex intertwined dependencies from completely different, often non-electronic, domains.
Hypothetical release co-ordinator speaking: "Did app A release this morning into EMEA prod? Ok that means app B can go but only once the security review team drop their veto. Has release candidate 2 been promoted to the canary environment yet? Remember B's new deployment process is in scope this release, and do not release to the 5 servers in the BCP datacentre today..."
Could you imagine managing the constant evolution of a rules engine to replace a good quality release co-ordinator? I don't think i'd be able to sleep!
As far as i can see, continous deployment doesn't have the general applicability that continuous delivery enjoys.
Yes, we do. Especially all those business users who have paid for GApps and have trusted Google with their comms.
In general, we deserve to have more decentralised services that are built on the principle of 'privacy by design', rather than 'trust by design'. Maybe, screw-ups like this can help spur more efforts in that regard.
We do, this is a huge violation of the trust people place in google's chat / hangouts. It doesn't matter that many people don't pay for the product, free or not there is an implicit contract between google and its users that things like this should not happen. Moreover, many people have paid subscriptions to google apps and obviously give them money directly.
I just opened the chat tab and i was shocked to see the conversation i had with my co-founder sent to my college friend. Two more lines from the same conversation was sent to my friend's brother. This is serious.
I'm starting to seriously consider moving my teams away from Google; especially for chat.
Hangouts has been a debacle. I'm furious that the upgrade was shoved down our throats (on Android) for a next-gen tool that was as feature incomplete as the first EA Sports' Madden game on a new gaming system.
Readit News
And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts.
As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well).
Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either.
When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved.
Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform.
[edit: spelling]
It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant
I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc.
If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists.
Edited: to use more polite tone.
It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
I use it every day and don't think i get anything like this issue (for balance)
Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.
So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.
Deleted Comment
Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?
This is where you turn it off until you fix it. This isn't a service disruption, this is a service malfunction with far more serious potential consequences than delayed emails, or inability to download an app, or duplicate credit card charges, and you can't fix those consequences after the fact, not even by applying vast amounts of money.
Edit: A bit of reading says that this probably is unrelated...
Haven't talked to him in ages, we had a good chat and we're going to meet for a drink at the weekend (sans probe). Cheers Google!
Pretty horrible bug.
A Norwegian example/proof: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83758451/Screenshot_2013...
Releasing is hard to scale up like google have to. How many apps are they releasing to daily...!
It's not technical building blocks (they can all be automated), not even busy work, just complex intertwined dependencies from completely different, often non-electronic, domains.
Hypothetical release co-ordinator speaking: "Did app A release this morning into EMEA prod? Ok that means app B can go but only once the security review team drop their veto. Has release candidate 2 been promoted to the canary environment yet? Remember B's new deployment process is in scope this release, and do not release to the 5 servers in the BCP datacentre today..."
Could you imagine managing the constant evolution of a rules engine to replace a good quality release co-ordinator? I don't think i'd be able to sleep!
As far as i can see, continous deployment doesn't have the general applicability that continuous delivery enjoys.
In general, we deserve to have more decentralised services that are built on the principle of 'privacy by design', rather than 'trust by design'. Maybe, screw-ups like this can help spur more efforts in that regard.
http://www.slashgear.com/google-blames-rogue-contractors-for...
Hangouts has been a debacle. I'm furious that the upgrade was shoved down our throats (on Android) for a next-gen tool that was as feature incomplete as the first EA Sports' Madden game on a new gaming system.