
How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare? - calcifer
https://www.tnhh.net/posts/google-talk.html
======
rident
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.

~~~
signal11
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

~~~
luka-birsa
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.

~~~
Freak_NL
Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform,
and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a
smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.

~~~
jhasse
A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.

~~~
notzorbo3
> A smartphone isnt required

It is for Whatsapp. Not only for sign-up, but actually all communication on
the web version goes through the app running on your phone. The web "session"
times out constantly, so I'd have to re-pair it with my phone all the time. If
I still decided to use whatsapp.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
To be really pedantic; a smartphone is not required for WhatsApp. You can
activate a Google voice number with a landline, then use your Google voice
number to activate WhatsApp running in BlueStacks or your emulator of choice.

Source: I did this for a few months. I'm not quite sure why...

~~~
philtar
A smartphone OS is required for whatsapp _

------
trothamel
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.

~~~
lobster_johnson
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign
in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there.

...Guess who bought it and killed it?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo)

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Yes, it was really good. It pretty much Just Worked(tm), had a good UI for a
web app, and was relatively lightweight (I remember using it even at crappy
airport computers).

~~~
tobias3
It used libpurple to connect to the chat networks -- same as Pidgin :)

------
b1daly
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.

~~~
Spooky23
It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are
incomprehensible.

Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.

~~~
m_mueller
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I suspect that nobody has figured out how to make money on it and that is what
is 'going on'. It does make one ponder how to do this stuff in a sustainable
way.

~~~
dvanduzer
Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable
groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an
acquisition target for those companies.

edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the
interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones,
WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Calling Slack "interoperable" is a bit much to me, though I admit it's better
than everyone else in the "new crowd".

I wonder if we need a new word for "interoperability in the time of SaaS" \-
the kind of where SaaSes talk to other SaaSes via locked down APIs, under
absolute control of the vendor.

~~~
dvanduzer
I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS.
Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and
plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable"
specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing
when talking about SaaS.

In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open
standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying
microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model...
Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.

I recommend this recent nested Twitter ("new crowd") thread amongst Stewart
Butterfield and many other early web folk, about whether Slack is a web app:
[https://twitter.com/stewart/status/961704310613491712](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/961704310613491712)

------
nkoren
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.

~~~
Shoothe
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).

~~~
delfinom
I've been finding Google Calendar incredibly buggy as of late as well as other
services. It's like they don't care anymore.

~~~
stephengillie
Google can't organize the world's data if the world won't trust Google with
the data in the first place.

------
djsumdog
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.

~~~
smt88
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.

~~~
inferiorhuman
> 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.

That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.

~~~
notwhereyouare
it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by
google. they basically left it as it for YEARS

~~~
pasbesoin
Exactly.

There's a reason users/clients have come to fear the Google acquisition of a
product they've come to depend on and in which they've vested hopes of
continued improvements and solutions.

At least Google hasn't outright put a bullet in Voice, yet.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Have any recommendations for commercially similar solutions, that also support
a proper SIP interface?

I'm preparing for _that_ day, when GVoice dies.

~~~
ossguy
[https://jmp.chat/](https://jmp.chat/) is a good alternative. Text and picture
messaging over XMPP, and voice over real SIP (with voicemail transcribed to
text).

There are lots of great XMPP clients, such as Conversations on Android, and
Gajim or Adium on desktop. Or use [https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/) if
you like a web client. iOS has a few options as well, including Tigase
Messenger and IM+.

------
oldcynic
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.

~~~
snitko
Have you tried Telegram? It's the best.

~~~
Piskvorrr
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]."

~~~
oldcynic
Not forgetting the rapidly escalating permutations. They say Telegram, work
wants Wire, someone else Whatsapp, someone else says Messenger and on and on.

Either install 27 apps or decide enough is enough. I've had just about enough
until one can aggregate like Adium used to.

------
lkrubner
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:

[http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-
wa...](http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wasters-with-
lawrence-krubner/)

~~~
pault
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.

~~~
j0hnml
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.

~~~
arkades
Personally, kind of.

I’ve moved further and further from google for my personal email and
communications, for all the reasons elucidated above. However, for my
commercial presence, I opened a gsuite account because it seamlessly brought
together - and kept together - disparate components that I wanted to be able
to use in a device-agnostic manner for myself and my team. I could have
brought things together from a half dozen different, possibly better, services
but gsuite was basically one-stop-shopping. I didn’t want to spend time
getting the tools together, I wanted to spend it on the job at hand. The
communications tools are good enough.

That said, I may change my mind about that. For getting work done I still find
Outlook kicks the shit out of gmail, and Microsoft Live or 365 or whatever
they call it has a very very solid online office suite (and their offline
tools remain best in class, IMO). Todoist integrates with both. I’m just lazy
about non-mission-critical upgrades. I don’t have a good replacement for
google hangouts, though. Skype is a festering tire-fire, and I don’t ever want
to use a webex unless I’m being held at gunpoint by the Cisco CTO.

------
promopacket
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.

A sad and systemic failure, indeed.

~~~
slivym
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.

------
busterarm
We used to have a relatively open internet based on developing, using an
adhering to protocols and open standards. This is probably because everything
was new and there was a lot of money on the table for everyone.

We would joke about peoples' theories of the "Balkanization of the Internet"
and mostly we would look at it from the wrong angle (nation states).

Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer
yours.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no
> longer yours._

And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. At this point I'm
actually waiting for someone to "innovate" a way to dynamically sign EULAs
with the same API calls you'd use to get access tokens, just to add insult to
injury...

~~~
techsupporter
> And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA.

And it's guaranteed to have some damned binding arbitration clause[0], if it
comes from a company based in the United States, so when[1] everything that
company knows about you is "unintentionally" transmitted to every hacker and
script kiddy with a modicum of PHP knowledge, you can't even band together and
financially ruin the company. Not that you'd be able to get anything out of
them, anyway, since 90% of them are so knee-deep in venture capital money that
you'd be 9,392nd in line behind the likes Sequoia, Andreessen, Y Combinator,
and Honest Achmend's Certificate Authority and Investing Company.

I guess I'm getting old but, damn, I'm really starting to hate the corporate
Internet.

0 - I loathe every single one of you who has ever posted on a Hacker News
thread about how horrible binding arbitration clauses are and who are also
founders/CEOs/operators of companies with binding arbitration clauses in your
terms of service. This goes quadruple for companies that are B2C. I do not
care if "everyone else is doing it" or your "lawyers recommended it." Grow a
spine and delete the clause if it's so awful. Go first. Be bold. Half points
for burying an opt-out that requires faxing a notarized statement to a phone
number in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. That's better than nothing.

1 - It's not "if" anymore, it's when.

~~~
busterarm
Unfortunately, spines were delaying the release and that feature was cut.

------
bitL
A typical process at a big corp:

Initial small enthusiastic team has a cool idea, works day and night, having a
lot of fun on the project. They release it, it's cool, useful and everybody
loves it. Then after a while original team members get bored or focus on other
interests, move out of the team and new team members come in. Those team
members aren't necessarily worse than the original ones, but have to maintain
the project they didn't write. They need to show their usefulness, so they try
to conjure new ideas that might not be useful at all, but hope they would be
visible enough to grant them promotion within the company. They focus on some
mistake/wart/non-refactored portion of code, make an essay or two to convince
management that changes are needed, then slap on another feature they could be
known for and proceed changing experience. Once they are done, management
applauds them and customers either are lucky and have a blast with the new
changes, or those changes were complete misses and started to ruin experience.
This process repeats often until product is EOLed or just maintained for
whatever reason.

~~~
promopacket
Agree that it happens, and think this case is different.

See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137)

~~~
tzahola
This case is _no_ different, right?

------
iforgotpassword
I can only agree with that post. Sometimes I'm wondering though if this is
just us techsavy people or the fact that I'm getting old and everything was
better in the old days. Maybe the average person not working in tech prefers
how this works today? Many times I'm already lost at the basic presentation of
modern websites or apps. Big colorful landing pages that try to aggregate
different data and events in an intelligent way but just seem like a jumbled
mess to me, everything has to be dynamic and load additional data via ajax so
that often times the back button doesn't work or at least makes sure the
scroll position won't be restored properly... I could go on for hours. I guess
I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more.

------
nvarsj
What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a
great product.

Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should
have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the
plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity.

There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G.
For example, play music's web UI has many irritating bugs that never get
fixed. I'm close to canceling my subscription.

I'd be pretty hesitant about committing all in to any of Google's enterprise
offerings, like GCE, based on my experience with their other products.

~~~
mistermann
Google just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I
don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super
senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers.

The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as
bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.

~~~
hedora
Their initial search UI was great, though they ruined that too.

I switched away years ago, and am increasingly baffled whenever I accidentally
run a google search.

~~~
mistermann
Switched to what though?

~~~
JBReefer
DuckDuckGo is really good - maybe where Google was a year ago but without the
user tracking. Also, bangs are awesome.

~~~
mistermann
Search results are as good? If so maybe I'll try, I've basically gotten to the
point that I could sider google to be mostly evil.

------
Groxx
For me, one of the worst parts of this transition is that as more people use
hangouts, _the experience becomes worse_. The utter lack of control or
signaling on it leads to tons of missed messages, threads that fall out of
visibility, and general "did they see my message? do they even use this any
more?" questions.

All of which Google Talk managed just fine. And if you wanted more control,
install a third party app, because it worked with them all.

What did we gain for this?

~~~
HiroshiSan
Not to mention you can't even delete messages on hangouts. One of the reasons
I switched to telegram.

------
intellegacy
you guys want to talk about frustration and pain from hangouts? pffff, try
this:

an important new client calls you on your google voice number, which routs to
hangouts. You don't yet have their number as it isn't in your Google Contacts
or your Phone Contacts.

You answer, but are busy, or need to look up something for them, and you tell
them you'll call them right back.

You get the info you need and you look to your recent calls for the call THAT
JUST CAME IN LITERALLY A MINUTE AGO. It's not there. Hangouts does not save
incoming calls. (or at least it didn't a year ago)

Why? Who the fuck knows??!

Google Hangouts: We Don't Give A Shit.

~~~
jackson1way
Exactly my experience. I was always wondering, if I'm just too stupid to
figure out how to see recent calls. Glad I'm not alone.

------
Skunkleton
There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a
modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org). Yeah, if it
takes off then it will just be yet another bit of fragmentation, but at least
it is designed in such a way that chats dont get siloed into a single
echosystem.

~~~
joshlemer
I have to say that, although I began to use Matrix for the open source / open
protocol aspects, their flagship client Riot is actually much more fully
featured than most other propriety products. For sure it is much more useful
than Google Hangouts and I'd say about equal to Slack in terms of user
experience and features.

~~~
Skunkleton
Riot is impressive, especially for something so new. Equally impressive is how
trivial it is to create plugins to bridge to other protocols. For example:
[https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-
Bridge/blob/mas...](https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-
Bridge/blob/master/Hangouts%20Bridge.py)

------
andrepd
>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or
it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down
and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation.

Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean,
and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-
chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, _with absolutely zero added
functionally to show for it_.

God damn it.

~~~
bronson
But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??

~~~
superasn
I just realized that Google+ isn't dead yet. Guess someone at Google is still
hopeful about its future?

P.S. Also the amount of shit Google+ has fucked wrt to Google services in
amazing. It also killed the "+" sign in Google's search results too.

~~~
MikusR
They have to keep Linus happy.

------
yeukhon
Google Talk was like the “cool” version of AIM to me when I was using it
between 2010 and 2013. I could access Talk from my browser or from a desktop
client (Pidgin, and I believe there used to be an official Talk desktop
client).

For some like me, I didn’t mind to have my messages/conversations stored like
an email (I am aware of some people’s privacy cocnerns). Even today I can go
back to my Gmail and look up my conversations with friends and family. I own
the conversation history, and I can export them at any given time! I can
search them and sort them directly in Gmail.

Now I use WhatsApp, Messenger, text messeage, and Wechat (for different groups
of people), I don’t know any mechanism to export my conversations. For
WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop
client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is
supported and is on per contact basis. No global search...

Communication used to be, hmm, simple communication: no snap, no video, no
crazy emojis and stickers :)

Google, what happened? :<

Orz

Edit: The only thing still usable is the free phone call from and to U.S. I
use it all the time since carrier signal is so unreliable and uneven (and
subject to surrounding environment) so I just hop on Wifi to make calls, esp
at work. PLEASE DON’T KILL IT .

~~~
shliachtx
> For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop
> client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is
> supported and is on per contact basis. No global search...

WhatsApp has search across all conversations in the mobile app (on iOS just
pull down on the main screen) and in individual chats (tap on the chat title
and select search from the menu).

------
faitswulff
My personal experience with Hangouts is that it would often hang and
disconnect so that I would have to forcefully close the app. Then it wouldn't
update the read receipts, or possibly worse, lie about who had seen what. I
put all of this down to my having an old phone.

Recently, however, I got a new phone. I was excited to have a usable Hangouts
once again, as that's where many of my close friends are. Unfortunately, now I
know that the problem is Hangouts, not my phone.

------
KKKKkkkk1
That's alright, the competitors are even worse. I used to use Skype on Linux.
They stopped development on the Linux client a decade ago, but it kept working
just fine. And then they released a new client and forced everyone to upgrade.
The new client is so bad in terms of sound quality that I've been forced to
switch to Hangouts.

~~~
fencepost
You might be able to use Slack or Discord, though I don't believe either offer
video options and the only real mention of voice that I saw for Slack was for
calls.

Still, Discord might actually be worth looking at - it's targeted at gamers,
but it does at least small-group voice chat reasonably well in my experience.

~~~
kalleboo
Our company switched from Skype to Discord after the new Skype client came out
and have been happy with it.

~~~
fencepost
If you haven't already, consider having at least some of your folks sign up
for Nitro so Discord can stay viable.

------
nitwit005
As to the contact list being some random list of names, I've noticed companies
seem to go through this sequence:

1) We get more engagement if people add more friends to the product!
Repeatedly nudge them to add ALL their friends! 2) Wow, people have a ton of
friends they aren't interested in. People don't seem to know how to manage
their friends list. Let's automatically pick what to show them.

------
petecox
I used Pidgin once and it worked fine on Windows and Linux.

So instead of one universal client, one requires Skype, Facebook Messenger,
Google Hangouts/Allo/Duo. (I don't use iOS but Apple have their own, I guess)

Thus if anyone wants to contact me, stay old school and use SMS or email! :)

------
CosmicShadow
100% this article. Google Talk was awesome, especially as MSN got more and
more bloated and then once they forced into Skype and everyone's contact list
got screwed up or people fled, it was like, yes, a clean client for use with
friends. Then it turned to garbage. I'll have someone call and 4 different
devices start ringing except the one I'm on, and then the others will continue
to ring forever. I called my friend back when it didn't work and we had like 2
different voice calls going at the same time together. He works at Google and
has to use it, so that's the only reason I keep it, I don't even know how to
use it it's so confusing now.

Shower thoughts had me thinking just the other day how I wished we could have
a new Pidgin like system. I have a hard time figuring out which friends use
which platform and where I can get replies. I want to keep in touch with
friends now that we all live in different places, but it's hard when everyone
lives in a different chat app that you only have 2 contacts in. It was awesome
when everyone just used one or two things.

The fallback to shitty text messaging is the only guaranteed medium for almost
all people on one platform.

------
pixelpoet
Just want to say thank you for writing this and bringing it to HN attention.

Gtalk was absolutely amazing, and you could even send files to your friends
_just so_ , just drag it into the window! It's 2018 and this functionality is
hardly available anywhere anymore.

~~~
jhasse
Telegram's Desktop client has this functionality.

------
jes5199
I gave up on Talk / Hangouts a few years ago, when I kept getting into a state
with it where someone would send me messages fine but my replies would be
delayed for several _hours_. It was possibly the most frustrating computer-
mediated interaction I've ever had - and I say that as a very cynical
programmer! After a few weeks of it happening intermittently, I said to my
handful of friends - "If you ever want to speak to me again, we have to find a
different platform". Now we're on a combination of Telegram and Slack, and I'm
happier. It's not as good as the world was in the AIM days, but, it gets the
job done.

------
martin1975
I don't use Google Hangouts, Allo or whatever else they produced since GTalk.

WhatsApp, Signal and Viber are the only ones I use and can reach most anyone
worldwide.

Google screwed the pooch on their IM strategy long time ago and there's no
coming back. Kind of like screwing the Google Pixel 2 by removing the 3.5 mm
aux jack.

~~~
aluhut
I don't even know someone who used to use those products mentioned here.

However, I'm still on IRC...so what do I know of this fancy new stuff.

------
eight_ender
Our entire company ran on GTalk for a while, then Slack landed like the
Spanish Flu and the IRC++ like features pushed every other medium out, except
for some, email. Hangouts was used in meeting rooms for a while but it was so
horrendously unreliable that we switched to GotoMeetings then Zoom.

Zoom is less shit than the others but still fairly awful. Slack, imo, solved
instant messaging in businesses completely, but conferencing is still a wild
west of garbage solutions.

~~~
tarjei
Try [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) it has worked wonders for us wrt to
conferencing.

------
rocky1138
This happened right about the time that Google abandoned the desktop as its
primary target and started focusing entirely on mobile. Things just haven't
been the same.

------
zmmmmm
Hangouts may be a disaster but even so it is still in my eyes the best
messaging solution in that it is truly cross platform, most people have
accounts (even if they don't know it, via google accounts), it supports at
least some open protocols (remnants of XMPP still works) and does all the
essential things (voice, video, text chat, presence, etc). I honestly think
that Google's best move _still_ would be to drop everything else and go back
to Hangouts / Talk as the single solution.

The problem is that the whole space is a nightmare where none of the players
actually has the best interests of the users at heart.

------
niftich
There are several contributing factors to Google's disastrous history with
messaging services, but a significant cause is Google being spooked by
Facebook.

In an earlier post of mine [2] (which includes an older revision of the
timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the
mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than
Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For
example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at
launch on 2008-07-11 -- of course, there were no push notifications at the
time -- not until 2009-06.

Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in
messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging
in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11
update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their
2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-
only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an
integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of
Gmail, where they went to manage email.

To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive
auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Unfortunately a few months later on 2010-05-20,
Android finally got push notifications, which enabled third-party messaging
apps to be viable on Android. This led to the rise of cross-platform messaging
network apps like WhatsApp, whose success came back to hurt Google later.

Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on
Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better
effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video
chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active
users, and on 2011-08-09 they introduced a standalone app for just Facebook
Chat, called 'Messenger'.

On 2011-10-12, Apple released iOS 5, which came with iMessages. This
significantly improved the iOS platform's story on messaging, putting further
pressure on Google. Having put many of its eggs into the Google Plus basket,
it needed a win, which it didn't get.

On 2013-05-15, Google liberated Hangouts from Google Plus so that it could
address messaging and social networking separately. Hangouts was being
repositioned as the Android-default messaging app. This helped onboard new
users, but on 2014-02-19 Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp. At this
point Google lost, and it began to flail about, sometimes reviving long-
forgotten apps like Google Voice, sometimes deprecating integrations it had
encouraged previously, and then making two more messaging apps.

Sources (in detail at):

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518)

~~~
rident
Thanks for the timeline!

------
secabeen
Fascinating. Within my social circles, we use Hangouts extensively. It still
feels a lot like the original Talk for us. The Android app works, on desktop
the Chrome extension is solid, I've never lost an important message, and the
features he laments the loss of (busy status, XMPP support, off the record,
contact blocking) just don't matter to us. I haven't had his experience with
adding people (if I want to chat with someone, I input their @gmail.com
address, done), message delivery is reliable, multi-media (photos, video)
works fine, voice and video calling works, search is in the Gmail we already
use, and group chats are easy and straightforward.

My social circle is almost exclusively Android, which may help, although the
few iPhone users do work, and a lot of chatting happens through the Chrome
extension/gmail window, so there's that.

I don't particularly want to chat through Facebook (Messenger is a busy, ugly
mess, and the app is pretty heavyweight) and many of my contacts aren't on
Whatsapp or WeChat. SMS often delays message sending and delivery in areas
with spotty mobile coverage. Hangouts uses wifi first, which is ubiquitous in
our homes and at work.

It's really interesting to see the different perspective. I do worry about the
future of Hangouts, it feels like it's just coasting now. Duo/Allo/Meet may be
an okay replacement, if they migrate all of the data over and swap it in
Gmail. I've played with their slack-competitor (Chat), and it's interesting.
Still doesn't feel as good as slack, but it's been okay.

------
pilom
One of the things I love about Google Fi is that I'm still allowed to
effectively use Google Talk and SMS still works in Hangouts on my phone. I can
do all messaging from the hangouts app with people over SMS or if they use
hangouts, the message can go over that. I can text and call with my real phone
number through the Gmail interface. Unfortunately, those with Google Fi are
the only ones still allowed to use it that way.

~~~
rch
Sure but the web interface for hangouts ruins the whole experience. How search
functionality can be ignored in a Google product is beyond me.

~~~
_asummers
You can search for label:chats in Gmail (extremely poor workaround) but this
doesn't work in Inbox, forcing you to navigate back to Gmail to search chat
history.

------
a-dub
It's funny how this seems to happen to chat systems over and over. Google
Talk, Skype for Business, ICQ... They start out pretty good, but then the
simplicity gets abandoned by what appears to be really awful committee driven
product design decisions until they basically become unusable.

Maybe their inherent simplicity makes them the ultimate bike shed.

------
Androider
I constantly have obvious spam accounts trying to send me Hangouts messages.
That there isn't simply an option to never allow anyone not already in my
contacts to message me is crazy.

------
m-p-3
Agreed with most of the points in the article. Google Talk was minimalistic,
but that was the whole point of it. And it was in a point of time where Google
actually tried to use an open protocol which was interoperable and extendable.

I could use Google Talk in Pidgin along will all my other IM accounts within
the same client, and I also could use some plugins like OTR to encrypt my
conversation if I needed to.

Now we're forced to use the Hangouts client which frankly isn't very good, and
everyone else is also trying to lock everyone in their platform by putting
interoperability on ice.

XMPP is still a good protocol, but no one seems to care :(

------
vijaybritto
I have never agreed more to any single article ever than this in my life! How
accurate! So true and the pain to leave GTalk still lingers in me to this day.
I experienced my first love in that thing ffs!

------
mastazi
I use Google Hangouts from time to time, not my favourite IM app but some of
the criticism in the article is inaccurate. I can definitely tell when someone
is online (article says you can't), and I have been using the desktop app for
a while (article says there is no desktop app).

Note: the desktop app doesn't seem to be native (I think I got it from the
Chrome store) however it's definitely a desktop app in the sense that you can
run it without having a browser open.

~~~
4ad
Are you kidding me, you can't even click on hyperlinks in that "desktop" app.
You have to copy-paste them manually in your browser.

Edit:

It seems the links do open, but they open silently in one of my minimized
browser Windows. And of course it opens in chrome even though my default
browser is Safari. Wonderful quality.

~~~
mastazi
I haven't stated anything that contradicts what you said

------
markbnj
Came hoping to read some insights about how the Gtalk debacle happened and
why. Left disappointed.

------
anigbrowl
Great piece. I used to use GT a lot, then it changed to Hangouts and I used it
less, then people were saying 'it's better to use Ello for encrypted chat' and
I thought 'why bother'?

I've had this experience with quite a few Google products - they just keep
getting larger and cheesier with no discernible user benefit. Everything just
keeps getting bigger and worse, even search.

------
goalieca
Hangouts also ha the worst video call quality of the bunch. It eats the
battery extremely fast (vp9). There was a two year period where there was a
feedback echo because the microphone wasn’t silenced, and then thrown to the
side for a newer and less complete/just as buggy duo and allo. Let’s not
forget the sms integration and then later deintegration.

Jabber days were good.

------
pfarnsworth
Google has the talent and the flexibility to make the very best instant
message client that would be useful for everyone... but they fucked it up
somehow.

It means they really don't care, which shows in their product. My chats often
get lost or delayed. I can't control my "contact" list, and there is no reason
why I shouldn't be able to except they don't want to allow it. I see my
friends who have died 3 years ago still on it, and I can't remove them unless
I block them. If my contact is "Off the Record" they don't even show up in the
list, which is infuriating.

I would love to know the reason why they let Gmail and Gchat go. My killer app
for the Mac is iMessage, mainly because it integrates my text messages and
Gchat into a single client. It's so convenient throughout the day for me.

------
johnmarcus
Wtf are you talking about? I use it with almost everyone, inside and out of
the org. Issues are usually local internet connection issues. And it's free,
which is nice. There are pay for services I suppose are better, once others
are set up with it. But I love Hangouts.

------
yason
I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a
light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of
the problems decribed in the article. Yes, the video chat was choppy but so
was any other video call at the time; I still managed to talk to my wife over
video on business trips so it wasn't unusable. I still like the Gmail chat
that you can pop up into a separate window. It's fast and reliable.

However, the issue with Hangouts is that I don't have people there anymore. I
talk to 1-2 friends on Hangouts who refuse to use Facebook or Whatsapp. That's
all nice but ten years ago I had a significant portion of my friends in Google
Talk. They still have Gmail accounts but they chat elsewhere.

------
KirinDave
Wow, I never once in my life just pinged a stranger on Hangouts and it seems
to me like a incredibly obnoxious and rude thing to do. Nor did my i5 laptop
flip out because of hangouts in Gmail.

I'm not a big fan of Hangouts, but if it stopped someone from pestering
strangers online? Good on it.

------
shmerl
It died when they killed XMPP federation (by refusing to support server to
server encryption).

------
kimi
Google+ has been quite a bit of a disaster. They wanted to tie everything to
it, and it ended dragging down everything else. Nowadays, for a quick chat,
Jit.si seems to be the easiest thing - it just works, you send them a link and
get online.

------
hitekker
You know what's even worse? Google Voice.

Terrible web-app, even worse iOS app. So many times where messages were
duplicated, or frozen, or stale. As in requiring a reset of the app to fix.

At least hangout was stable despite having equally poor UX.

------
vadimberman
Continuing the train of thought of the comments bemoaning the state of the
instant messaging: can anyone recommend a simple instant messaging / voice
call combo like the old-timey Skype?

~~~
MRPockets
I use Wire[0] now. It offers IM, voice messages, voice & video calls, & a
decent set of unobtrusive "silly" features (voice filters, ability to send
drawings, etc).

Finding people is generally easy but for some reason, it will sometimes not
find someone when you type the entire username but will find him/her before
you finish typing the username out.

The best part is it works well on Android without GApps & seems to work much
better than Skype in video calls on a slow connection.

0 - [https://wire.com/en/download/](https://wire.com/en/download/)

------
carapace
I worked at Google. An observation:

The internal codebase should be structured like the yellow-pages of a
phonebook[1] but instead it's structured like a flea market.

Now, consider that in light of Conway's Law[2]...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook)

[2]
[http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html](http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html)

------
djhworld
People on here bemoan the loss of XMPP integration and federated access to
these platforms, but do Facebook/Google/Microsoft really give that much of a
shit about that? I suspect the % of their userbase who wants, let alone
understands those features is very small

~~~
TeMPOraL
Of course they don't give a shit. Because they understand the game - they're
the ones putting things on the market, and users have zero choice (network
effect means good marketing beats any feature set here).

------
olfactory
This is one more bit of evidence that Google is on the way down. When basic
product management is too boring to take seriously, the company is just
coasting along on past glories and hype. Yahoo was in that situation for years
before it imploded.

------
qbaqbaqba
That's funny how a huge company may bring a technology to the mainstream and
then kill it just like that. Jabber, RSS. Open protocols that treated their
monopoly. What's next on the kill list? HTTP, email?

------
dnsva
The following are postulations that I have not managed to refute since 2013.

Google clearly knows what they have made. The theory that nobody cares to fix
this is false. They have good engineers.

Google was always tracking our location and scanning our emails. Few things
happened simultaneously in 2014. Google tried to replace the messaging app
with hangouts, blatantly stepping on privacy. Inadvertent signing ups for
Google+ could occur. I switched to Cyanogenmod.

Navigating new privacy settings would took so long. Then Google maps started
suggesting where I intend to go.

Not very creepy. It seems to me that Google intend to do the right thing,
which is to declare publicly that our privacy is compromised, (e.g. Snowden)
when we use Online centralized products. That is a good thing. I stopped
trusting my ill-founded sense of privacy.

I lived in Canada, perhaps the timing was different in the states.

------
iamgopal
Google needs to streamline their communication product in to one that works
across all platforms. And also need better product manager that understands
that choices are bad. And not working choice doubly so.

------
brohoolio
I have a folder on my iPhone for all the various google chat apps, allo, duo,
hangouts, meet and the list goes on and on.

Not an application, but a whole folder filled with chat applications!

All my friend have moved onto slack.

------
m0d0nne11
And, as if to further illustrate the problem with dysfunctional WWW stuff, the
ony way to comment on that article is via Disqus...

------
dawkins
I miss google talk but it was just chat. I use hangouts this days for chat,
voice and screen sharing and it works well enough.

------
ciupicri
The things that sucks most is the fact that everything is recorded and it
can't be erased. Goodbye privacy.

------
keypress
Totally abandoned all chat applications after the demise of Gtalk and cross
network communication breakdowns.

------
m3kw9
I thought talk and hangouts do the same things, google needs to do a better
job in marketing

------
krisives
Google Voice was similarly “updated” over time and is very good anymore

------
PhantomGremlin
I don't use Google Talk, so I don't know how accurate the article is.

But if it's at all true, it should become an HBS case study in how to destroy
a community and how not to write software.

------
mrhappyunhappy
Same way they managed to screw up Google voice.

~~~
analogic
Shhhh, don't give them the idea to cancel my voicemail transcribing app.

Or does voice actually have other features?

------
surferbayarea
How many product managers do they have? 50?

------
jayd16
All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile
connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the
longest and they get the most flack for it.

~~~
chii
> There's a reason no one else is using it.

because they cannot own the client, and therefore, cannot completely collect
the valuable part of the service - user data and activity data etc.

