
Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know - janvdberg
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/05/26/gchat_was_the_future_of_messaging_why_did_google_make_other_chat_products.html
======
Perceptes
Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous
state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up,
I implore people to look into Matrix
([https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)), a system with an open
specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-
to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a
company. I really hope to see it enter people's consciousness as one of the
most serious contenders for messaging systems.

Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client
([https://vector.im/](https://vector.im/)). You can connect to the public
server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with
all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can
also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need
to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are
interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including
mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec
and the system are more promising than anything else out there today.

If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my
project, Ruma ([https://www.ruma.io/](https://www.ruma.io/)), which is a Rust
implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't
expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.

~~~
Bromskloss
Haha! I just tried Vector on iOS and apparently moved about in such a way that
I accidentally triggered the greatest notification message:

> You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a
> bug report?

~~~
matthewmacleod
I've seen this UI in other apps, and I absolutely fucking hate it. Google Maps
was a particularly egregious offender, where rotating the device or
calibrating the compass would prompt for feedback, usually in the middle of
trying to use a map. And who shakes a device in annoyance anyway?!

~~~
StephenConnell
No kidding. Especially annoying when using Google Maps and driving a stick
shift.

~~~
drewm1980
The stick shift gesture should notify the police of your location and
destination.

------
mmastrac
We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a
reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by
others) and a even emoji.

When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for
interoperability. Facebook followed suit.

I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development,
but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going
on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.

~~~
inopinatus
The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil"
was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values.

But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built
with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

~~~
mike_hearn
It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the
result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil".

I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that
boiled down to:

1\. Nobody used federation.

2\. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive
whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort.

3\. It complicated the code a lot. Features that existed in GChat but didn't
map well to XMPP were harder to implement.

4\. The XMPP protocol sucked on mobile and sucked in web clients, and
therefore Google's own clients were not using it any more. New extensions like
Jingle were more like entirely separate protocols than small upgrades.

Federated chat protocols are the sort of thing that intuitively sound nice,
but networks that implement them inevitably end up being killed off by closed,
proprietary competitors that are simply a whole lot better. Email hangs on,
kinda, but I passively await the day that the email system is killed off by a
closed network. It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and
I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too.

Moxie Marlinspike has written some thoughts on why federated protocols are
yesterday's solution here:

[https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-
moving/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice
is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value.

~~~
Freak_NL
> […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is
> the phone number […]

To me this translates to:

“Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value
nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that
_john.doe@gmail.com_ is the same person as _feetfetish33_ so we can better
quantify you for targeted advertising.”

I am willing to entertain the notion that federation is not a solution, but
seeing how you now either place yourself in this panopticon or you don't and
'miss out' on things makes me feel that we should at least attempt to figure
out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people.

For all its warts and issues, email is still effectively federated, and will
stay like that for quite a while due to the needs of many (not all, I
certainly grant you that) businesses and local, regional, and national
governments to control their own email infrastructure (mainly due to
legislation and control).

~~~
mike_hearn
I have yet to encounter a chat network that uses targeted advertising, so
you're well off into the realm of conspiracy theories there.

Chat networks are all moving to the use of phone numbers because users mobile
phonebooks are a vendor neutral, open access social network of high value
contacts that almost everyone has and for which there are simple APIs
available.

Phone numbers have other advantages. They are difficult to register in bulk
(it can be done but it costs a lot more than bulk registering web accounts
protected only by a CAPTCHA). Regulations in many part of the world enforce
the ability to do number porting which makes mobile numbers truly user owned -
unlike email or jabber ids which are ultimately owned by the organisation
after the @ symbol. There is a simple remote attestation protocol: you can
prove you own the identifier by simply providing a challenge code. Everyone
understands them. And it outsources identity management costs to the telcos
who have large branch/shop networks to help people who e.g. lose their
device/SIM. Building out and staffing account recovery infrastructures is a
significant driver of costs for large web platforms. For instance if you have
a contract then you can recover your identity by physically walking into a
local telco shop with your passport, you will walk out with a replacement SIM
(and the prior SIM remotely deactivated) a few minuets later. It's partly by
shifting these costs to the telco networks that WhatsApp was able to scale to
hundreds of millions of users with only 50 employees.

When I look at how things work done this way vs a traditional internet
federated network like email, Jabber, IRC etc, I have to agree with Moxie -
it's not so bad, actually. I'm not normally a big supporter of government
regulations, but making number porting obligatory is a relatively low cost
rule that makes the use of phone numbers as the universal id a lot more
palatable, because it's truly user owned at that point. Switching mobile
networks and switching chat networks is a _lot_ easier than switching
email/xmpp providers because forwarding has always been an afterthought in
such protocols, is legally optional, and at any rate is always going to be
more complicated than just re-assigning ownership of a truly provider
independent code.

~~~
dredmorbius
Phones are dying. Too inconvenient, too much spam, pants vendors, pervasive
surveillance, pants call and voice quality, and a phone is too small for a
tablet.

It's got a few years yet, but POTS and mobile are already legacy, they just
don't know it yet.

~~~
mike_hearn
Phones are dying?

Better hope Apple shareholders don't find out!

~~~
dredmorbius
Apple is in a position to make the transition.

It's not the _devices_, per se. It's the _network_. The infrastructure. And
the ability for Google to rely on _a phone number_ per person. It's an invalid
model.

And voice comms are _occasionally_ useful, though I make them rarely -- it
could easily be months.

The idea of carrying a bundle of angry that can start sounding at any time,
anywhere, is a turn-off. Especially if I've no control of who's at the other
end.

Two of the primary reasons people carry phones are because _others_ demand
that they be reachable, and secondarily, so that _the phone holder_ can reach
others. The second I don't mind _as much_ though it's also a crutch.

A device _with good text capabilities_ , that can _also_ optionally receive
voice inputs _and convert that to text, allows a_ very* limited whitelist set
of calls, and otherwis directs all incoming traffic to a wait or _prove your
worth_ queue, would start to approach reason.

I remember the days of five-line dial phones and office receptionists, pre
voicemail. It sucked for the receptionist, but coming back or into the office
and being handed a stack of message slips was _vastly_ preferable to bouncing
through voicemail and having to do the transcriptions yourself.

------
jalami
The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems
to be _centralize everything_. I think it's because centralized systems are
easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of
media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it?

Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with
things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with
Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the
desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the
average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it.

I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone
chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The
status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix
movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a
Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start
demanding DRM-FREE social relationships.

Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like
more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with
their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede
control of all facets of your business to third-parties".

~~~
Frompo
Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think
there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school
children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't
already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could
just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it
just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working
well in my desktop client :(

~~~
duskwuff
> Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis.

And critically: that standard needs to _not_ be XMPP. It's a mess of a
protocol that's difficult to implement, and which fails to adequately support
many common use cases (e.g, mobile clients, file transfer, and group chats).

~~~
jalami
I think we should coalesce around a clean modern modular standard that's not
XMPP for the perfect world scenario. It's not perfect, but I think you
overstate how bad it is. Conversations (a mobile client) allows pictures and
(file transfers) and with multi-user-chats MUC (group chats). It takes
implementing some XEP's on the client and the server in order for everything
to play nice. Implementation is a bear and some XEPs are simply too
complicated for their footprint. However, if no one is interested in the open
federated standard communication protocol we have, even less are interested in
adopting another one we haven't written a line of spec for yet.

~~~
Arathorn
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, Matrix is seeing quite a lot of
adoption as an attempt at a clean modular federated standard (albeit very
different in philosophy to XMPP) - there are around 30 clients, lots of
bridges, services and bots, and multiple servers in development. There is very
much an appetite and interest in open comms still, as the popularity of
articles like these attests!

~~~
jalami
Matrix is interesting. I like where they're going and once their encryption-
layer gets out of beta, I'll take a harder look.

Right now there seems to be a significant Axolotl/PEP/ratchet/OMEMO/olm
schism[0] that I hope doesn't fracture decentralized IM any more than it is.
App-store DRM v. Copy-left purism (not being derogatory) seem to be at the
root. At least multiple parties are trying to work together here instead of
forging ahead alone. I'm hopeful.

[0]
[https://github.com/anurodhp/Monal/issues/9#issuecomment-2080...](https://github.com/anurodhp/Monal/issues/9#issuecomment-208063040)

~~~
Arathorn
The point of Olm as an independent Apache-licensed double ratchet is
absolutely not to fragment E2E, but just provide an alternative clean-room
implementation for those who want it (and to be one that we can easily audit
and build on for Matrix). We will do everything we can to ensure that Olm
directly interops with whatever the OMEMO team ends up doing. Given Olm is
written to be compatible with TextSecure this shouldn't be an issue.

Just to be clear: mismatched E2E is obviously the mortal enemy of
interoperability. Which is why it's really exciting that so many systems are
using Axolotl derivatives, and it's absolutely critical to ensure they can
interwork.

------
nnain
Gchat was (and is) wonderful -- minimal and elegant. I never understood why
Google was so hell bent upon trying to move the users from Gchat to Hangout.
They would have enough data to know the number of times users clicked 'no' to
moving to the new interface!

Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App
would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds
like such a loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat.

In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and
functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of
Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface
(from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and
useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After
that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the
meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down.

GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years
back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know
the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and
marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.

~~~
drumdance
I thought Google Wave had huge potential but the rollout was so poorly
handled. It was a group app that only called people in by invitation, so I
couldn't add my team members without them having to go through a signup and
wait for approval process, killing all momentum.

~~~
nnain
Yeah, Wave created quite a buzz, at least within developers/early-adopters. It
was complicated and heavy though. I didn't get fond of its features, for the
few weeks that it existed.

------
aftbit
Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed:

1\. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a
message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one
client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting
where I left off. Etc etc.

2\. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent
search.

3\. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file
uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.

4\. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.

I had high hopes for [http://shout-irc.com/](http://shout-irc.com/), but it
ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is
not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I
mentioned.

~~~
reactor
[http://www.mattermost.org/](http://www.mattermost.org/) is doing it

~~~
fredrik-j
Technically Mattermost is very interesting. Unfortunately I cannot figure out
their licensing scheme and business model. The license file mentions several
licenses: AGPL, Apache 2, and the MIT license. They seem to apply separate
licenses to binaries that they publish vs the open source repository. Is there
an implied open core business model somewhere? How do I know when Mattermost
Inc will show up and demand money for a proprietary license because I've
misinterpreted what parts of the mattermost software is AGPL licensed?

[https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/4ae72ad1a878fdf1...](https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/4ae72ad1a878fdf1fc3a25068e783e5a24432f08/LICENSE.txt)

~~~
Freak_NL
Why not ask them to clarify?

Mattermost is explicitly a self-hosted solution. Their license does not appear
strange to me; you can either use their builds, or build from source and
adhere to the AGPL.

------
reuven
When Slack first came out, and everyone got all excited about it, I was quite
skeptical. I've been using Skype (and lots of other IM systems) for years; do
I really want or need something new?

The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And
nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop,
in my browser, and on my phone.

So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did it do the right things in a narrow
technical sense? Absolutely. But without the slick, inviting, easy-to-use UI,
it wasn't going to go anywhere. And now that Slack has critical mass, it's
hard to imagine Google catching up.

~~~
nly
Ultimately slack is just a proprietary IRC, with a solution for message
persistence falling out its centralized design. IRCCloud and ZNC both solve
the same problem. Its slick as hell, but still a walled garden.

~~~
reuven
Yes, this is my greatest regret and problem with Slack: Someone could have
made amazing IRC clients (and servers), and kept it open to the world. It's a
shame that a solved problem with open-source tools has been turned into a
billion-dollar proprietary company.

------
chickenbane
I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely
successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On
the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for
mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo.

I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily
searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an
interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously,
it's also simultaneously terrifying.

Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding
work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but
also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their
non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often
than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have
my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat
interface more than google.com.

~~~
Nullabillity
> On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity
> for mobile is phone number.

I don't get this. Just because you're using a device that has historically
been tied to a specific method of identification doesn't mean that you have to
limit yourself to that? Should desktop chat clients start only identifying
people by IP addresses?

~~~
detaro
Indeed. Nearly all phone-number-as-identity services fail at allowing multiple
clients (Whatsapp and Signal have at least something, but not perfect either),
which is probably the biggest issue I have with newer messengers.

And it makes changing my phone number more annoying, for IMHO no good reason.
Allow people to configure their phone number for discovery if they want, but
don't make it the primary identifier.

------
lewisjoe
A really big fan of Gchat here. What I was amazed at in the software was, how
reliably it worked no matter how less your internet bandwidth is.

The desktop GTalk app was tiny, handy and powerful. Back when I couldn't
afford a wired internet connection in my home, I used to bridge my phone's 2G
data to my computer and when nothing else worked with that tiny bandwidth,
_GTalk did_.

Hangouts - is just sad. It loads visibly delayed. Every conversation you click
at, again takes milliseconds/seconds to load. Never had this cognitive delay
in GTalk. I miss it.

------
inputmice
Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another
5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to
take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client
Conversations ([https://Conversations.im](https://Conversations.im)) is a
prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis,
End-to-end encryption, group chats…

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
conversations is really nice. thanks for making it. one problem i have with
it, that gchat solves really well, is how it behaves when you have a desktop
client and conversations open at the same time.

when someone using conversations writes to me, what i expect is that i get the
message on my desktop, as well as on my mobile client. but conversations will
ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message, if on my phone or on
my desktop client. this should not happen. it should just send it without the
resource set, and let the xmpp server figure it out.

~~~
inputmice
This is a confinement of OTR. OTR was never made for modern day instant
messaging. Use OMEMO or send unencrypted messages and you won't have this
problem.

------
bakhy
Hangouts was horrible to me for just one reason - on the smartphone, it hid
info on who is online right now.. perhaps this was designed to motivate us to
send more messages, but it meant i could no longer easily know if someone
might answer now, or if i better try sms/call/.. and then as of recently,
Hangouts just fails to notify me of messages, or keeps re-notifying me of old
ones, and now i barely use it any more.

Google+ had a similar design decision, when it showed (don't know if this
changed) friend suggestions without indicating if those people actually use
Google+, or if your adding them to a circle will just spam them to join a
social network they don't (want to) use. it's understandable that Google might
want to do these things to grow their platforms, but without tact and
understanding for what the users really want, they're achieving the opposite.

~~~
curt15
At least now they've sort of restored the online presence indicators with the
"last seen XXX ago", but I still don't understand what can be so hard about
searching hangouts conversations on the phone. I can search through emails and
through SMS. Why not hangouts?

------
rekoros
Oh wow, we'll be adding three more services to this --
[https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf](https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf)

No words.

------
andersonmvd
I may be a resistant one, but I prefer and still use gtalk/gchat/hangouts over
slack or any other tool. Slack requires either another tab, a new mobile app
or a desktop app, which isn't that great when switching between organisations.
At least on my Ubuntu Linux.

Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what
you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the
conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in
hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored.

If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple,
that would be great IMHO.

------
ronnier
To this day, ICQ is still the best messenger I've used.

~~~
MildlySerious
May I ask what made it the best messenger for you? I hated every second I
spent on ICQ. The ad-infested client, the fact that if someone else thought
24px purple comic-sans was their identity, I would have to deal with it..

The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an
Emoji it was converted back to its text version.

~~~
ronnier
I mean pre-ad days.

------
bluejekyll
I think gchat had a horrible ux.

Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it
really has over irc is UI/ux.

~~~
wtbob
The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.

It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is
cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost,
essentially, _nothing_.

~~~
CJKinni
> The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.

I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new,
modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many
NickServ options, for example.

~~~
foobarbecue
But you can abstract that stuff in the client with a few lines of code and the
user never needs to know! All the IRC web clients do it. mibbit used to be
great, and then they mysteriously disappeared...

~~~
jasonkostempski
Mysteriously disappeared? I don't know anything about it's history but I
happen to use something that, at least, goes by that name [1].

[1]
[https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&serv...](https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&server=irc.gamesurge.net)

------
dade_
XMPP is a zombie protocol. Yes, it has clients that have better implementation
of instant messaging and presence than any other, but it falls apart with real
time communication such as voice and video (lol jingle) and there is no
practical way of iteroperating with the PSTN. Further, federation of plain
text and basic presence worked, but rarely anything more. Connecting with
federated users makes no sense to end users, first they have to know it is
possible, then they have to figure out how it works and then they learn most
features don't work. Even if that wasn't awful enough, it was all dropped by
the providers and no longer works. All commercial platforms are moving away
from the protocol, and SIP is now the standard. Problem is that it isn't a
great chat protocol for end devices (no standard concept for buddy lists being
stored on a server or mobile clients, but many proprietary extensions work
well). As for slack, it is a group chat with slick interface, other than the
bizarre account/domain design. It has no encryption of data at rest, and I
really wouldn't use it for confidential data. If you are going to use a
proprietary closed source solution, at least consider using Cisco Spark. Now
Matrix, it is almost too good to be true, grass roots open standards,
federation that makes sense, encryption by design and doesn't lock users into
yet another captive island (YACI?). It is also built with the concepts of
accounts/SSO, true federation, real time communications in mind. I dream of
the day we can kill the PSTN, but with something even more open... Sadly none
of the commercial players today are interested. Any one company that thinks
they will do it on their own has fallen for their own delusions. Microsoft
Skype, Whatsapp and a hapless Google Hangouts... What a mess.

------
dclowd9901
Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have
moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be
separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that,
because Gchat was associated with personal accounts.

It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for
work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and
Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it.
You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to
seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to
replicate that platform.

No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was
limited by its auth scope.

~~~
icebraining
_Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with
personal accounts._

What about Google Apps for Work? It's been around for a decade.

------
pkaeding
> And there are even still some holdout users on old-style Gchat.

I'm not sure if I'm one of those holdouts? I've been using gchat, mostly over
XMPP (using adium), and sometimes in Gmail. I frequently search chat history
in Gmail.

I didn't realize that gchat had such a tumultuous history.

~~~
tizzdogg
Yeah I still use it daily, and now I'm worried it's going away. I wonder how
many holdouts there are out there?

~~~
prutschman
I rely extensively on Gchat via Adium.

------
est
> Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

Google nows that, but improvements upon Gchat is not best fit for OKRs and
Googler's future resumes. Why not invent another wheel so you can show off
next GoogleIO?

------
ec109685
Slack nailed it with the notion of teams. You invite someone into a team and
there's an instant tachonomy of conversation to join. The ability to be in
multiple teams at once is hugely helpful as well.

~~~
swrobel
Yes but each requires its own username/password combo!

~~~
spronkey
This. Hideous and awful.

~~~
jhgg
Check out [https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)

------
wodenokoto
I remember Gchat as a constant struggle to try and turn off unwanted
functionality in Gmail.

I also remember Gchat as being one of a a number of a number of instant
messaging options from Google that had very unclear market position and
operability (I honestly didn't know that gChat was talking with Google Talk, I
thought those where different)

At least now, it is only Hangouts I can't log out of, and at least it doesn't
show up in gmail.

------
ronreiter
I made a mock that could explain how Google can still compete with Slack
today. What do you think?

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/55nr2tggbu9rw4q/slackingoogle.png?dl=0)

(If there's anyone from Google here that likes the idea then drop me a line at
ron.reiter@gmail.com)

------
sametmax
We already have a perfect messaging system that is fully interoperatble,
works, is relieable and doesn't need a new account because everybody has one:
emails.

You can perfectly chat with emails, the problem are that all clients make you
use emails as digital letters instead of chats. But you could perfectly
imagine an email client doing what gchat used to do.

~~~
gkop
Email isn't fast enough. Gchat was/is faster.

~~~
sametmax
Text messages are very slow, and nobody minds. People on iMessage don't see
the difference.

It's more a metter of perception. When you click on a mail, it takes a lot of
time to type, then your UI have a delay to say it's sent, then you have this
time taken by many clients to move your mail to the proper folder. But a
proper mail-chat client would just make the message appear as sent, then to
all the stuff in background, and you would just not see it slower than other
chat. The time people take to answer you message is usually the bottleneck,
not the network.

~~~
gvurrdon
This application appears to do pretty much what you're suggesting:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingapp.ap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingapp.app)

Unfortunately, my colleagues insist upon using Skype instead of email, apart
from the few I've persuaded to use Google hangouts instead.

------
partycoder
IRC was the future of messaging but until Slack came up with a different
experience, people didn't know.

------
tehabe
Federated system are nice but clients for Jabber have very different quality.
Some would support things you like others don't. For example iChat will always
sent the background and forground colour of the chat bubbles with the message.
If you added a photo to a Google Talk conversation, some people could see it
others don't.

I kinda liked what Moxie once wrote: the notification area of your mobile
device is the new multi protocol client and since most IM services are using
identifiers like phone number or email address instead of user names, the
barrier to switch a service is lower. This is the one big advantage to use the
user's address book as a social graph for IM.

------
antoniuschan99
I spent two years of my life focusing on chat and I think it's matured to the
point of oversaturation in todays market.

Chat itself should now be viewed as a commodity, it's the features that's
built on top of it that will differentiate one platform over the other.

Enterprise chat used to be a differentiator, but everyones doing that now too.

I think document sharing (Dropbox, Google Drive) and chat are basically in the
same place right now in that both have been democratized and both have an over
saturation of similar services.

------
kinkdr
ICQ actually predates AIM

~~~
stormbrew
It doesn't say it didn't (that I can see). I think it's saying AIM brought the
concept into the mainstream, and I think that's probably more or less true in
the US.

Interestingly (to me, at least), this seemed to be pretty reasonable. No one I
knew in Canada had AIM, except if they talked to Americans regularly. MSNM was
very very popular, though. And ICQ before it.

~~~
Frompo
Yeah, you needed aim if you wanted to chat with some americans when I played
utopia. Meanwhile the big IM breakthrough among my less technical friends was
msn. I quite quickly found a stand along multi-protocol client and I've stuck
to that mode of managing IM since when I could control it.

------
fh973
I wonder why they never added drag and drop file transfer. If you understand
it as a presence concept and not just "chat" I think this is a must.

------
sinzone
For those who remember, it wasn't Gchat the "Slack" of Google but a project
called Google Wave.

------
stevewillows
gchat was great. I really wish Google build on Hangouts to integrate SMS like
iMessage. Having a proper desktop SMS client is the only reason I ended up
going back to IOS a few months ago.

I can understand why they dropped XMPP. I'm not sure if they really violated
their 'don't be evil' motto as much as they recognized that other services
were improving on their dime.

I like Slack for corporate environments, but IRC is still top dog when it
comes to interest-based real-time communities.

~~~
grahamburger
If you use Google Voice the sms (and voice) integration is very seamless.

~~~
stevewillows
I should have mentioned that I'm in the neglected nation of the north. I do
have a google voice number that was grandfathered in from Grand Central, but
the GV number is in Seattle.

------
tbrock
No, they are different.

One feels like IM and the other feels like IRC.

------
wnevets
The gchat UI was so much better than everything else out today. So simple and
yet still very useful.

------
some1else
MSN Messenger was the future of messaging

ICQ was the future of messaging

IRC was the future of messaging

Smoke signals were the future of messaging

------
nipponese
Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are
asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with
iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power
of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit
where it's due to Slack.

~~~
aerovistae
Did you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs?

The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays),
and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded
all of them by many years.

I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe
I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it
archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew
used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the
article. I can still dream.

It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-
browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was
2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never
promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite
the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion
users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly
impressive failure.

------
erikb
GChat was painful to use. IRC and Jabber are the predecessors.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Google Talk was based on Jabber, so you could log in to it via any Jabber /
XMPP client.

------
homero
I miss it

------
draw_down
Right, they couldn't let it be its own thing. It always had to be under the
umbrella of some other thing that nobody actually wanted. It's one thing to
make something nobody likes, it's quite another to make something very popular
and then drown it in social-sauce till its users don't want anything to do
with it anymore.

------
frik
IRC, XMPP, WebRTC, WebSocket and AJAX.

Almost all common chat clients are based on one of these technologies.

The most straight forward protocol to implement is certainly IRC. It works
very well for group chats and is used by many open source projects and in
house usage. FBchat and Gchat are based on a slightly non-standard XMPP, at
least started from that point and turned less and less open.

Maybe I am a forerunner, I used chat a lot more several years ago, and
nowadays write a lot more (short) emails or just talk in person (or over VoIP
with video). On the other side, we will chat/talk a lot with our personal
software assistent in future.

------
andrewvijay
I got my first girl friend, mini project approval in college and many more
from that gtalk. I was devastated to know it was discontinued. They could have
just named hangouts as gtalk and released it. Which would have been a good
effort. Companies work so hard to create brand value in their products but
Google unintentionally creates value and destroys them later on. Phew.

~~~
icebraining
_They could have just named hangouts as gtalk and released it._

Then a lot of people would be claiming Google was being dishonest and tricking
its users.

