
Google Talk Is Being Discontinued - flyingramen
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g-suite-to-streamline-hangouts-and-gmail.html
======
scrollaway
Here's what I don't get about Google.

A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside
MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not,
they're all dead.

Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity
as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail,
and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and lightweight chat app, right
in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the
time!

Google has _failed_ to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored
Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to
compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's
proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half
your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones?

So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and
they used their Android market share to do that. People didn't like it, still
used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds
of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because
everybody's gotta reinvent the wheel.

You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing
with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has
treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then
completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and
become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything.
Who's making these decisions exactly?

Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it's
honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord
([https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)) for essentially all my
communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even
most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms
tech, even as an open protocol). It's proprietary, but at least it gives me
text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn't suck - and there is no open choice I can
make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to
it.

~~~
shmerl
Not just failed. Google betrayed XMPP. You can blame Eric Schmidt for it. He
gave some lame speech about how other instant messaging services aren't
playing fair, so Google should also become a walled garden. And that was it.
They made Hangouts and stopped caring about federated IM idea.

It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like
Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatible AOL and Compuserve
forever.

And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought
they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated
or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose.

People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in
another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps this is the point we need legislation to require that IM services with
above X users in the relevant jurisdiction must provide a full, open, protocol
and enable interoperation via the published protocol? That's the only way I
see the companies involved would move to enable cross-platform communications?

Aside:

>It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers.

I have a shared account on a small ISP, Microsoft won't receive our emails,
even when replying to an email from a Microsoft user, even when user
whitelisted. [It's probably the same with some other suppliers?] The only way
to reply to people using Outlook/Hotmail/Live (I'm a user of hotmail for
something like 16 years) is now to send via MS servers - basically had to make
an account for this purpose.

The sending IPs aren't blacklisted with Senderscore (or other blacklists, I
mention senderscore because they apparently provide domain reputation services
for MS); some "related IPs" have medium reputation scores (senderscore 72).

~~~
colordrops
I'm not a big fan of legislating technical standards, but in this case I think
I could support it. IM has become a fundamental communication mechanism.
Imagine how held back society would be if we had 50 different voice standards
rather than the singular phone system we have now. IM needs to be forcefully
standardized.

~~~
danudey
Korea mandated through legislation that all online shopping had to go through
ActiveX controls, because that was the only way to guarantee secure encryption
at the time. Now it's practically the least secure way to online shop and even
Microsoft recommends not using ActiveX, but it's a huge amount of work to
strip that infrastructure out and make everything work 'properly' so it's
still an issue even today.

In short, legislating a solution is a workaround that can turn out to be a
huge detriment not too long down the road. I'm no libertarian, but it seems
like a bad idea to me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a good point - especially important if someone's thinking about
legislating a _particular_ technology. On the other hand, maybe in this case
it would be enough to legislate a requirement for _openness_ of the protocol?
I.e. whatever it is, if it has enough many users, it has to be fully available
to third party integrations.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
What about SMS? Everyone has it, it works, and is usually fairly instant. It's
not very feature rich, but could there be an SMS 2.0 protocol that was
backward compatible?

~~~
hiptobecubic
Isn't this RCS?

------
eachro
At this point I have no idea which Google chat client is which. A few years
ago I remember having Google Talk on my android phone. Then after some random
update the application disappeared from my phone and was replaced with
hangouts. Now is Google Talk the same as GChat? Was Hangouts anything more
than just a new branding for Google Talk? I have no idea. And what's up with
this Google Allo thing? Again, it seems like Google seriously dropped the ball
with branding and communicating wtf was going on. Most of my messages has
moved over to FB Messenger or Whatsapp/Wechat and Google only has itself to
blame for that.

~~~
furyg3
Seriously. I somehow ended up using all of them, and I honestly don't know
what's going on anymore. I thought my Talk got merged into Hangouts, if I
start a chat in Gmail it's sometimes findable in my iOS hangouts app, and
sometimes it's not. A while ago the Voice team asked me to merge Voice with
Hangouts, which I did because clearly the service was dead. This seemed like a
plan... your SMS chats are just chats in Hangouts and in addition to calling
other Hangouts users you can call phone numbers, but we're keeping the Voice
app & site around for legacy users. Fine. But in January they released an
upgrade to the Voice apps with this gem:

 _If you currently use Hangouts for your Google Voice communication, there’s
no need to change to the new apps, but you might want to try them out as we
continue to bring new improvements._

W.T.F? Don't bring me into your internal office politics...

Then there's Allo because with all the above they made it too complicated to
chat with someone or something. Also Duo, because video calling was completely
missing from the offerings above (it wasn't).

~~~
cpncrunch
I just use hangouts on all platforms, and it seems to work well. Although I
did have to install "hangouts dialer" on android to make phones calls from
Hangouts. Not sure if that's still required.

Google: please just leave hangouts alone!

------
erpellan
"Collaborate on standards. Compete on quality"

Or something, I'm probably butchering the quote. There's a reason we can play
CDs from any manufacturer in every manufacturer's player. Likewise SD cards,
VHS videos, DVDs...

The importance of working with your competitors was well understood in the
1980's. Seem's it's a lesson we need to learn again:
[https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-
an...](https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-and-win)

~~~
1_2__3
Good analogy. I was thinking of this the other day - while technically the big
players are in standards committees together and do work on common standards,
in practice it's a bunch of corporate maneuvering that bears no resemblance at
all to things like the kind of things Sony, Toshiba, Onkyo, Panasonic and
other big players do when they decide they want to accomplish something. Can
you imagine Google, Apple and Microsoft regularly forming cross-team working
groups to specifically develop technology and associated standards to be
adopted by all?

They're too busy suspiciously eyeing each other's userbases to waste time on
anything like long-term strategic thinking that benefits anyone but
themselves. To be honest it feels like that kind of collaboration is long gone
- it came about because it was necessary to actually serve consumers. But
while someone who purchased a Compact Disc player is a Sony customer, a person
who uses chat is not a Google customer - they're a SKU. The whole way the
Internet tech industry is structured is exactly the _opposite_ of what you'd
want if you wanted to encourage collaboration. By making users and their data
a commodity instead of customers there's no benefit at all to improving their
general experience.

~~~
remir
Well, The __Alliance for Open Media __is a step in the right direction. You
have Cisco, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Netflix all on board to work on the
AV1 open video codec as an alternative to HEVC. This is great and we need more
of that.

------
makecheck
Sometimes I think they named themselves Alphabet, Inc. so that they can have
26 different versions of a product, one for every letter of the, er, alphabet.

Their executives need to get on a whiteboard and make a few simple mandates,
such as:

1\. There will be a single protocol for messaging across all Google
properties, compatible with open protocols where feasible.

2\. There will be a single “app icon” on Android, and single app on each major
platform, for achieving communication. All legacy messaging services will be
available from this point.

3\. Every reasonable handle for identifying users will be supported,
including: profile names, E-mail addresses, real names, and legacy messaging
user IDs.

4\. Effective immediately, every single team working on every Google chat
product will report to Foobar McManager, whose compensation will depend
directly on achieving integration goals by $DATE.

------
startupdiscuss
I just had an image of myself posting the headline:

"Google discontinues Gmail and Search"

as a way to kickstart a conversation about our reliance on services, and
whether we can blame companies for not subsidizing services we like and so on.

But then I realized it would just go sideways into a discussion about click
bait and appropriate headlines, so I am posting it as a comment.

~~~
james_pm
The Gmail part would go something like: Google discontinues Gmail and Google
Inbox is the replacement! Then a year later, Google intros Mail from Google, a
new webmail client that is like Inbox, but has more of the classic email
interface UX that users expect. A year later, they announce Inbox is going
away and everyone should move to Mail from Google, which they have rebranded
"Gmail".

~~~
kristopolous
In a den of lions when saying this, but companies that do that have too many
engineers.

There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-
thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things.

This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of
quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better
products; they use simpler paradigms and abstractions, have better combinable
primitives, communicate purpose more effectively, and produce overall better
tools.

The corollary is the stupid thing you can hack to do what you want is often
better than the smart thing that is very carefully designed to do what you
don't - because one of them you _can technically_ use and the other you can't.

This is why earlier versions are frequently better than later ones and earlier
products seem to do more, better, and faster. It's why smaller companies seem
to produce better things, and counter-intuitively, products that take less
time to finish (say a few days) seem to do better and gain more traction then
the 6-month effort.

Some things really are profoundly complex, like databases and operating
systems. Most things however, despite much we'd like to pretend, are not in
that class of software.

And yes, these claims are cultural bomb-throwing. But the evidence for it is
solid.

~~~
tiglionabbit
I'm contracting with Google. This is exactly the kind of argument I've been
tying to make to my boss for over a year but to no avail. They come up with
pet names for me to express how weird they think that type of engineering is.

~~~
marktangotango
"Lazy" like it's an insult when in fact it's the highest praise?

------
Pxtl
Losing SMS from Hangouts is the bigger deal for me.

I _liked_ having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and
videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user
experience.

I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix
has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as
a hub - every chat system logs their history for a given contact into their
contacts app, so I can open up a contact and see every communication app (even
multiplayer games) and an interlined history for them all? That would make
this work.

I could take the SMS, the chat, voice, even the _dialer_ off the home screen
and just have contacts - even a shortcut to my wife, so I could just open a
person and then open a communication app for that person. That would work.

But without that, having a zillion small communication apps does not provide a
good experience because the android home screen is a _bad_ shell for lots of
small apps. It's just a launcher that's good for big monolithic ones.

~~~
isaiahg
When did Hangouts lose sms? I still send sms messages from it daily.

~~~
Pxtl
From tfa: imminently.

------
ereyes01
Boy, do I regret giving so many people my GV number and using it as a main
phone number...

They are also removing Hangouts' SMS integration, BUT:

> Note: This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use
> Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS.

That doesn't really make me feel great, it's only a matter of time before it
changes again, and I'm quite sure the experience of staying in Hangouts will
be awful in the meantime. This whole SMS + Hangouts + GV situation is such a
clusterfuck, yet I feel a bit trapped in this ecosystem right now due to the
stickiness of a phone number that family already remembers, and numerous
business cards I've handed out.

I know they recently polished up the old GV app, but the FB Messenger +
Whatsapp ecosystem looks so much nicer now... I wish I can just somehow hand
them my GV number and leave this Google mess behind... or somehow redirect
everyone to my carrier number.

~~~
Declanomous
I'm thinking about porting my GV number away from Google, if that is even
possible. Voice used to be the best thing ever, but now it has a shadow of
it's original functionality.

~~~
rrdharan
It is possible.

I ported my T-Mobile number into GV in 2013 when I switched to Android and
Hangouts first added GV/SMS integration, so that I could send SMS from the
desktop.

Then I ported my number back out to T-Mobile again in 2015 when I switched
back to an iPhone and regained iMessage.

------
plg
I'm really not being a troll here, I'm just confused:

Google Talk : what is that? Is that the little box on the left hand side of
the page on gmail that lets you chat with other gmail users?

Google Hangouts : different? I know it's videochat but it also has text ... a
different thing?

The Android/Google phone chat app thingy --- is this different still?

obviously I'm not a regular google user at least not of these services

~~~
Pxtl
Hangouts _was_ until recently, a combined videochat/IM/sms app for desktop and
mobile, tied to your google account. If you had a Google Voice service
account, it could also be used to send SMS messages from the desktop.

But then Google decided they didn't want Hangouts to be that anymore, and are
stripping out features to focus it as the "corporate" messenger while they
split its functionality into _three_ different Android apps - Allo, Duo, and
Messages.

So now Hangouts is just a desktop/mobile videochat and IM. No more SMS. And
they have a "consumer-oriented" pair of voicechat and IM apps in Duo and Allo.
But they're not compatible with Hangouts so if one user uses Hangouts and the
other one uses Allo, they can't communicate directly.

Google has gone mad.

------
lotso
I still use Gchat over Hangouts because it's nice seeing my contacts list
sorted by who is online, as opposed being ordered by recency of last
communication.

So many of my Gchat conversations have started because of the online status.
I've hit up friends that I haven't talked to in over a year and had really
great, synchronous, conversations because of it.

~~~
TorKlingberg
"online" as a concept has become a bit meaningless with mobile clients.

~~~
cptskippy
This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so
pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always
online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing
but I guess others don't see it that way.

People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone
rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with
people you didn't log into your IM client, if you wanted to chat with someone
specifically there was a first class UI element for setting your status so you
could tell others to leave you alone. Email and SMS were black holes where you
only knew if your message was received via a response.

Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM
someone. Read receipts are standard so you know if someone got your message.
If someone's phone rings while you're eating, you're lucky if they apologize
before answering, and you've won the lottery if they excuse themselves from
the table.

It seems like we're all just sitting around waiting for an interruption to
distract us from the life in front of us.

Idk... you damn kids need to get off my lawn.

~~~
remir
You are allowed down time. If people don't respect/understand that, it's their
problem, no yours.

I don't answer the phone when I eat or after 10pm. Same thing with text
messages/emails. "Do not disturb" mode is there for a reason.

~~~
cptskippy
"Do not disturb" is there because people do not respect each other anymore.

------
shmerl
I'm pretty upset at Google about how they handled IM. It basically cost me
more than a half of my contacts (who use Google), since first XMPP federation
with Google Talk stopped working when Google refused to support server to
server encryption, and now it's being dropped altogether.

So much for moving things forward, instead of falling into the dark ages of
incompatible balkanized instance messaging services.

~~~
marssaxman
That decision basically killed instant messaging for me. I miss it, but there
just isn't any critical mass anymore. I could run half a dozen different
messaging apps, each one reaching some subset of my friends, most of whom are
never available anyway, but the old situation where it was easy to keep in
touch with people via chat just doesn't exist anymore.

~~~
smelendez
I think instant messaging also worked better in the PC era, when you knew
people were active, "away" or altogether offline.

The messages I want to send or receive with a phone notification are a lot
different from the ones people would exchange in the old days of IM.

------
smdz
GTalk was an amazing simple-to-use application. Should I say it was simpler
than Skype. I don't like hangouts at all.

~~~
Liuser
Their Chrome plugin was also wonderful. Keyword "was". It used to be a
discreet window that persists across tabs, which you could minimize and expand
from the lower right corner of your screen.

They killed it and now it's an awful behemoth google hangouts window. Really
disappointing.

~~~
Denvercoder9
Yes, I loved the old Hangouts extension. By far best experience of any IM app
I've used (and that's a lot, unfortunately).

------
ouid
God damn it. I do not want to use the Google Hangouts experience. Talk is a
simple, elegant chat application. That is all I require and all I desire from
Google. And I do not want to be patronized about how I actually want more
"integration" with google products.

~~~
ceejayoz
Hangouts is solid proof that no one at Google uses the multiple account
support. If they did, it wouldn't be so awful.

I click a hangout link for a work call and get "no one in the call". I have to
add authuser=1 to the URL manually to see that it's actually that I don't have
permission to it.

~~~
james_pm
This. Happens all the time and then people say, "You never showed up." The
authuser=1 tip is great. Thanks for sharing that!

~~~
X-Istence
At the bottom, in tiny font, there is a "change account" link that gives you
the ability to switch that call to a different Google account.

It's tiny, you might have missed it...

~~~
ceejayoz
Sure, but it's silly that it's required, and the "no one here" is hugely
misleading.

Google knows which accounts I'm logged in as. They know which accounts have
access to the meeting. If I'm logged in as one of these accounts, why not do
it automatically for me?

------
LTom
I’m getting really fed up with Google. Yet another time when they nudge me
towards using a service, only to retire it a while later. A separate app for
SMS again , just when I’m comfortable with centralizing it in Hangouts. And
Allo and Hangouts aren’t compatible, right? Every time I jump on Google’s
newest app bandwagon it seems to end up being another ephemeral thing.

~~~
LyndsySimon
This may be a little dramatic, but I feel like I have to say it.

Everything is ephemeral.

Google's problem is that they don't keep services around long enough nor do
they plan a reasonable migration strategy for when they shutter them.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Ephemeral is okay.

But having three (four? I honestly don't know) competing services from a
single provider and playing "guess which one's the evil twin" is shitty.

~~~
LTom
Yeah, there’s:

* Allo (text chat)

* Duo (video chat)

* Android Messages (SMS etc.)

(And Google Voice also does SMS iirc)

And of course Hangouts, which is able to do all of those currently, but is
going to be split up into different business-oriented apps for some reason.

If Allo and Duo had just been another client for whatever protocol Hangouts
uses these days, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But like it is now, I don’t
feel like I can ‘rely’ on Google at all. Facebook Messenger has been a far
more stable experience, even though I have some reservations about it.

------
ungzd
This blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more
not mentioned here):

\- Google Talk

\- Hangouts Meet

\- Hangouts Chat

\- Android Messages (something new, never heard of it)

(And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS).

How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are
inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.

~~~
netsharc
But Facebook Messenger now wants to eat Snapchat's lunch and is offering
Snapchat functionality. Great, that annoying cat lady who I'm "friends" with
now can spam my Messenger app with pics of her cat. And I shared a picture
with a friend and Messenger suggested I posted it to it's NotSnapChat. It's a
single button inside the chat bubble, which makes me wonder if the publishing
happens directly when I push that button, and who'll be the next Anthony
Weiner after he accidentally presses that button...

~~~
delecti
I downloaded Facebook Messenger Lite and highly recommend it. It strips out
everything except... well... Facebook Messenger. I can message people, and
there's none of the extra UI crap, including their Facebook branded Snapchat
copy (not to be confused with their Instagram or Whatsapp branded Snapchat
copies).

Officially it's only supported in emerging markets, but you can download it
from apkmirror and it'll install just fine.

------
aclimatt
Can somebody please explain to me Google's messaging strategy? As a Voice,
Talk, Hangouts, SMS user for what feels like the last decade, I am so
incredibly confused that I want to walk into Google and fire all 18 of the 19
messaging teams. That way at least we'll have one singular group to yell at
when things go wrong.

Here's the Google Messaging landscape as far as I know it:

\- Google Talk in Gmail: I think this is what my work account has, and what
they're shutting down: [http://imgur.com/Z0v6Zjq](http://imgur.com/Z0v6Zjq)
This one is pretty useful because you can initiate a new Hangouts Video call
right from this interface, as well as open up the Google Talk Voice POTS
Dialer (?)

\- Google Hangouts Messaging in Gmail: I think this what my personal account
has, and perhaps what's sticking around?
[http://imgur.com/dBf7me2](http://imgur.com/dBf7me2) This interface clearly
got upgraded a bit, but removed the ability to create a new Hangouts Video
call unless you're initiating it with a specific person (or I couldn't find
the place to do it)

\- Google Hangouts for Android: This is a dual Hangouts and SMS client that
supposedly will send messages with the two services above ^, plus over SMS to
your carrier contacts. This is also being discontinued?

\- Android Messaging: Sounds like a new app that's coming out which will
replace the SMS side of the above existing Hangouts app

\- Hangouts Chat: This is the new app that's going to replace the IP-based
messaging feature of the current Google Hangouts for Android, right?

\- Hangouts Meet: This is the new app that's going to replace the video and
screensharing portion of Hangouts for Android it sounds like. Why these two
are now separate apps is beyond me. But it sounds like these two will
interoperate with Google Hangouts in Gmail (the second screenshot), and the
first one is disappearing and/or being converted into the second. OK, I think
I'm staring to figure this out...

\- Google Voice: Oh don't get me started on Voice. I've been a Voice user
forever, and we finally got an upgrade! Which made no sense, because I thought
they were killing it? But now they're not? So now Voice is purely for SMS-
based communication, and would be an alternative to Android Messaging, just as
it always was (with its new web client as well). But if you were one of the
unlucky people who chose to integrate your GVoice SMS experience into Hangouts
for Android, I guess you can still use that? Supposedly that's still
supported, but I didn't, and I fear for whoever ends up with that
experience...

\- Hangouts Dialer for Android: This is / was the POTS dialer that integrated
with Hangouts, and allowed you to dial any POTS number over VoIP. AND it
lightly integrates with Google Voice, because it uses your GVoice number and
balance for international calls. BONUS: It can also /receive/ inbound calls
that are placed inbound to your GVoice number, OR from Google Talk, because
"Google Talk" was considered a "forwarding phone" as as Voice was concerned.
Is that part going away? Can you "call" people over GTalk now? Sounds like no,
but you can still "Hangouts Meet" with them, and if you have the Android
client, it will ring your phone? I guess that makes sense... What about
inbound calls to your GVoice number and being able to answer them over VoIP?
That works today, and it'd be a real bummer if it went a way.

\- Google Allo: Hey remember this? Probably not even though it's only less
than a year old. This is an entirely separate walled garden of a messaging app
that allows you to Allo (text chat) other Allo users. But it also DOES have an
SMS bridge (surprise!), and you can Allo non-Allo users, however the receiving
SMS end is still a little questionable and is more meant as a user-acquisition
funnel than a transparent GVoice-like experience. I believe this was meant to
be a WhatsApp clone, but nobody uses it.

\- Google Duo: And then there's this thing? I guess it's almost identical to
Hangouts Meet now? Maybe Hangouts Meet is for Business® users and Duo is for
your friends and family? Maybe Duo uses voice recognition to censor all
business communication? (That was a joke, but...)

It's just that simple! Screw Google and whoever is running their messaging
division. Except I think that's the problem: nobody is. Which is why this post
exists.

I still think Wave could have solved all of our problems...

~~~
gsnedders
> Screw Google and whoever is running their messaging division. Except I think
> that's the problem: nobody is.

Nobody is. AFAIK, they're basically all from different divisions of the
company, and that's why it's a total clusterfuck.

~~~
jaxondu
I always thought the reason why there is a CEO is to avoid such clusterfuck.

------
cpburns2009
The only benefit I see out of this is the removal of SMS support in the
Hangouts Android app. I like my communication channels separate. I don't like
Hangouts or Facebook Messenger wanting to control my cell phone messages
(SMS).

This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that
chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?

~~~
smt88
> _I like my communication channels separate._

You could always keep them separate, if you wanted to. This feature was
totally invisible to people who left it turned off.

I personally want to have all my messaging in one place, which used to be
possible. Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how
each person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app, find their
name, and then message them. It's incredibly frustrating to have a worse 2017
messaging experience than I did in 2007 with my BlackBerry.

> _This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is
> that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?_

Chat in Gmail is Hangouts.

~~~
Chaebixi
> Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how each
> person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app

I think this is true to an extent, but I think messaging isn't as simple "get
this text to this person." Different communications channels have different
contexts, implied importance, etc. Making them too unified papers over and
confuses those social differences. For instance, it would be super weird if a
coworker _texted me_ instead of IM'd me about some everyday work thing.

~~~
jooize
We should solve that within the same protocol. Allow multiple named
conversation streams for any combination of contacts with an interface to
filter them (private, work, dating, family).

I also want priority of messages to let the receiver handle them differently
(low/normal/high). Default ‘normal’ and changeable within reach, but quite
invisible. Anyone can then let me write a ‘high’ priority message that makes
noise in the middle of the night, or if I suspect they're resting and I want
to send a cat picture I'll use ‘low’.

------
brooklynmarket
We're actually talking to Google. If they don't up their game with their Alexa
like device, AKA Google Home, it's next on the chopping block. Big disconnect
there. She sounds like a robot, development tools are really a fraction of
what Amazon offers.

The sales revenue is so high for their click model, their best minds are
working on how to get people to click on ad's for shoes. Needs a shake up at
Google, for sure. It's time.

Maybe everyone having to pass their fabled "white board" coding interview is
leaving creative minds behind? Everyone just knows the best way to do a binary
sort, and not much more. That's my thinking.

~~~
adtac
Not really relevant, but there's no binary sort :P

------
bahmboo
This is for G Suite business customers. They don't explictly say if this
applies to regular Google users.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is more likely regarding the fact that Google is obligated to warn their
paying customers, and not obligated to warn their products. If these services
didn't tie to G-Suite, there'd likely be no warning at all.

------
UnoriginalGuy
I've been avoiding Google Hangouts because when it first shipped you had to
sign up to Google Plus. Does anyone know if that is still the case?

I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years
due to the Google Plus requirement there also.

~~~
vocatus_gate
> I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years
> due to the Google Plus requirement there also.

Same. I purposefully stopped reviewing products on the Play/App store as soon
as they forced you to use your G+ profile. Why on Earth does my real name or
main profile need to be associated with a short app review?

------
berberous
Can anyone explain why if I switch to upgraded Hangouts I see only a few
online contacts, but in the old Google Chat I see a bunch of people available
and online? It's a serious regression and will cause me to stop using chat in
gmail for the most part.

~~~
triplenineteen
I'm not 100%, but I think this has to do with a Hangouts setting: "Show when
you were last active". If that is unchecked, it means that some users (some
clients?) will always show you as offline.

------
Balgair
Color me surprised, yet again. At this point, even gmail's continuity is
suspect. What can you trust Goog with these days? Maps is awful unless you
want a hand-warmer on the slopes, Wave went kaput, now Talk? Are they trying
to ruin my trust in them?

------
g9
So, this is just funny to look how ad company with a lot of $$$ is playing
with its toys and throwing it away as soon as it is already boring.

------
draw_down
They should just keep a constant URL that will redirect you to whatever is
their current messaging/calling product of the day. Jeez.

~~~
vidarh
That'd be a bit like [http://www.uroulette.com/](http://www.uroulette.com/) \-
you'd never know where you'd end up.

------
joshstrange
Google's failure to produce a service/system/ecosystem around chat is
astounding to me. Google Chat was around well before HipChat, Slack, Gitter,
etc and yet they came in and ate Google's lunch. At work we use HipChat but we
pay for Google Apps for email/drive/etc. It's crazy that Google Chat and
Hangouts suck so much.

------
js2
_This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use
Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS. Project Fi users who wish to use Hangouts
as their SMS app will also not be impacted by this change_

What kind of sense does that make? Does this mean that Voice and Fi users
can't use Android Messages for SMS? And what about MMS?

------
Animats
They also want to destroy SMS, converting to "RCS messaging powered by the
Jibe RCS cloud from Google".

------
donatj
I've never understood that Hangouts… wasn't Google Talk? I still don't exactly
understand.

~~~
wykydtron
Google's marketing department.... Ugh... Gmail (for your website) gets renamed
to Google Apps, then rebranded to Google Apps For Business. Then they throw
that out the door and call it "G Suite "G Suite for Business" and "G Suite for
Enterprise" \- killing me Google... I mean Alphabet...

------
skdotdan
Unveiling Google Chat: a new messaging app from Google, that will coexist with
Voice, Talk, Hangouts, Allo and G+ Messenger m, and eventually be canceled.

------
tlogan
But they also mention that Hangouts API will stop working [1]. Which is kinda
strange: if Hangouts is the new thing then why to shutdown the API?

I'm asking this more from a developer perspective: lets suppose one wants to
integrate their app with google "chat / collaboration" systems (like one can
integrate with Slack, Facebook, etc.). What to do?

I have feeling that Google executives are thinking something like this "lets
just buy Slack and call the day".

What are you thoughts about this?

[1] [http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3002204/google-
is-s...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3002204/google-is-shutting-
down-hangouts-api-as-it-lures-consumers-towards-allo-and-duo)

------
hkdobrev
OK, Google Talk was a dead man walking for some time now. Even if it's not a
nice decision for open standards at least they made a final decision whether
they are either improving it or killing it. However, Google have completely
lost their mind with messengers. GTalk, Hangouts, Messages, Messenger, Allo,
Duo, Chat, Meet. Some available only on mobile. Some supporting SMS, some
working only with SMS. Allo having G assistant in chat, G assistant is only
with voice on their pixel phone. The tipping point was when both Hangouts and
Messages competed to handle my SMS messages and when Hangouts won because of
Gmail integration, they removed SMS from it. They really need to get it
together.

~~~
vidyesh
_> G assistant is only with voice on their pixel phone._

What do you mean? Google Assistant is now available for almost every Android
device, it has replaced Google Now and can be invoked like you invoked Google
Now before.

------
martin1975
...and this is why I no longer use any chat clients from Google... WhatsApp
and Viber connect me to more than half the planet, and SMS, shitty as it is,
works with just about everyone in the world. For everything else, we have
email or file sharing.

~~~
Markoff
i agree with second half about SMS and email, but WhatsApp owned by Facebook
is big no no and Viber isn't that popular, so i keep Signal and Skype Lite

personally i would not mind if we would use email as chat, there are already
clients able to do that, it would solve lot of problems

------
microcolonel
I still wonder why we can't just do IM over SMTP. There's already tonnes of
volume, the latency is basically good enough, and the format has lots of room
for progressive enhancement through the addition of parts and formats.

As someone who administrates a small SMTP peering group with a friend, I'm
constantly baffled by the reinvention of the wheel. Presence could be easily
signalled by messages which degrade gracefully. i.e. send a human-readable
email that says you're online or offline, with a presence header verified by
DKIM/SPF/DMARC, or you could even revive Finger. Use whatever protocol between
the mailserver and the client.

~~~
bigbugbag
Someone did make an instant messaging over email thing recently, but I can't
remember its name and searching for instant messaging over email is quite a
haystack.

------
accountface
Good. They should kill every chat app except for Hangouts and merge
functionality.

They're losing a lot of points with customers with the "have 10 teams make 10
apps that do the same thing and slowly kill off support before discontinuing"
model.

------
vowelless
For a second I thought they were discontinuing Google voice and almost
panicked as my main number is my Google voice number.

Actually, has anyone migrated away from Google voice to a better service ? I
would be willing to pay a little bit.

~~~
yeukhon
I too. GV has been a great product for me espeically I get to use it to
numbers within the U.S.

------
X86BSD
I have come to loathe Google. Android is a tire fire mess. It's UI is
horrible. And as bad as that is I have google fiber tv and that UI is even
worse. Google does NOT get UI.

Everything short of gmail that they have tried to make work has failed. They
don't innovate. They create short lived products that bring in no extra ad
revenue. Google is ripe for being replaced. It's big but so was MS. You may
love Google to death. I think they are a company with no vision, no
innovation, and are milking the ad revenue teet. Someone is going to replace
them.

~~~
spronkey
Yep. I'd also mention how many viable alternatives to Google products and
services they have shuttered because Google offer theirs "for free".

They have an almost-monopoly on the advertising space, their resources and
size make it difficult for others to compete with them, and they treat their
users like dirt. Wait sorry, they don't have any users, they have products.
And they treat those like dirt.

------
edpichler
That's why I think twice before adopting a Google Product.

Google Talk was really good, I miss a simple communication app like it was.
The best I ever used, on my opinion.

------
chatmasta
I honestly couldn't even tell you which google service "google talk" is. It's
amazing how incompetent their product teams are.

------
maverick_iceman
Maybe they make promotion decisions based on new product launches,
incentivizing multiple products over the unsexy work of maintaining old ones.

------
grabcocque
Remember the first law of Google services: if it's not useful to sell you
better to advertisers it's not useful.

------
z3t4
How do you manage to keep up with the latest messenger fashion ? I gave up
when people changed from MSN to Skype. Then they changed to Facebook and now
they are probably using Whatsapp or some other I don't know of. When I want to
chat I use IRC. And I've also setup asterisk as a SIP server for voice calls.

~~~
Markoff
i still use Skype, specifically Skype Lite is quite nice, so that's one option
for video and chat, other option for video, chat and SMS is Signal and if
neither of them works for you, you can always email me or call me

used wechat because lived in China, but uninstalled everything Chinese after
leaving that place, tried Facebook messenger (later Lite) for few months until
decided i don't really need to have Facebook account and anything to do with
Facebook, which means i ain't gonna install WhatsApp either, so there are not
many other options left

------
Steeeve
All this discussion about what the future is in the messaging space...

The future is disarray, just like the present and just like the past.

IM isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve, even at scale. (and
certainly not at startup scale)

It's not a good advertising medium, and nobody will ever spend significant
money in that space.

It's an add-on feel good service.

~~~
yeukhon
IM isn't easy to solve, but it really is. All you need are

* commitment

* nice UI

* nice add-on services

Putting Skype's privacy and issues aside, it has proven to be a very
successful IM product for the past decade.

Slack, HipChat are more geared toward developers / tech workers.

IRC is probably one of the oldest and still widely used because of its
simplicity (once you know how to use it, it's easy to use)

If you merge all of them together, and have a real product team to support the
product forward, it won't be hard. Of course, if your goal is to integrate
with 20 other services, yeah, you will run out lucky hitting someone's walled
garden.

------
wnevets
Aka their best chat client. Instead of having one great chat platform they now
have several not so great clients.

~~~
wykydtron
Allo, Duo, Android Messages, Hangouts, Gtalk. Oh you have 3 Gmail's because
you've been an Android YouTube and Google Apps user since 2010? Good luck with
that nightmare, we'll get all your personal and business contacts all jumbled
together!

~~~
cptskippy
I just figured out I could access my hotmail inbox from outlook.com using my
Microsoft Account credentials associated with an email address setup through
Google Apps using a custom domain.

It was full of spam.

------
geofft
What does this mean for the ability to search Hangouts conversations from the
Gmail "chats" label? As far as I'm aware, there's no native search in Hangouts
itself (e.g., [https://hangouts.google.com](https://hangouts.google.com) ).

------
pgrote
A couple of questions concerning this announcement.

1) With the removal of SMS from Hangouts on Android does anyone know if this
affects SMS in Hangouts on ChromeOS? 2) Is retiring a euphemism for killing in
terms of Google Labs additions or does this mean they will still work, but
won't be made available to new users?

Thanks.

------
xnx
Like many, I'm supremely confused about this history and current state of
Google's various chat systems.

Does anyone know of a comprehensive timeline of all the various permutations?
I would read it just to boggle at how many poor decisions could be made by a
single company in a single category.

------
arrty88
As part of our continued effort to focus Google+ around shared interests,
we’re retiring two legacy Google+ features in Gmail: the ability to email
Google+ profiles and the use of Google+ Circles. (Expected: No earlier than
April 24, 2017)

Whaaaat? Emailing profiles was the most useful part of g+

------
math0ne
I use pidgin, how does this affect me?

~~~
ajross
If you use Pidgin to connect to an XMPP federated service, then that won't
work any more.

If like basically everyone relevant, you use Pidgin to directly chat with
Hangouts users and to hang out on IRC (the federated protocol that actually
succeeded in the marketplace), then you don't care.

I genuinely don't understand the outrage in support of XMPP. It didn't work
out guys. IRC tuns out to be all anyone actually wanted, and to the extent
that's not true, it would have been eaten by Slack anyway.

~~~
peapicker
You didn't see this part in the article?

> "Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1
> chats."

------
nojvek
Google wants to be like Apple. Lean and mean but it's got a big problem.

They want to release and try new things but also still be focused on the big
money makers.

That means expect a lot of crap from Google like wave, allo, duo, buzz etc.
Some hotshot inside Google wants a promo and pushes new products like popcorn.

But Google management needs to show $$$ so they need to focus on the big cows:
search & ads.

In Steve Jobs era a ton of shit would never even see the light of day.

Google literally has so much money and resources that it actually hurts them
innovating.

Their best strategy is to acquire products with good market fit and scale the
shit out of them.

------
tehabe
The worst news in this announcement by Google is that "Quote Selected Text" in
Gmail will be retired, it was essentially the only lab feature I used, I even
got used to. I'm sad to see it go.

------
nawtacawp
[https://pbxinaflash.com/community/threads/r-i-p-google-
voice...](https://pbxinaflash.com/community/threads/r-i-p-google-voice-
again.21208/#post-129739)

"Looks like June 26 may be the final curtain call for Google Voice. Google
today announced that it's finally pulling the plug on Google Chat upon which
Google Voice relies on the Asterisk platform."

~~~
jameskegel
You're quoting the comment of a guy taking his sources out of context. The G
suite article he uses as a source doesn't contain the word Asterisk nor Google
Voice

------
mindcrime
_XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be
supported starting June 26._

Fuck you, Google. Just fuck you...

~~~
thrill
I wish someone at Google would explain their overarching strategy and target.
This piecemeal approach just reeks of no coherent plan.

~~~
maverick_iceman
I doubt they have any coherent strategy in the messaging space.

~~~
zokier
Throw shit on the wall and see what sticks? Isn't that what pretty much
everyone is doing?

~~~
bigkm
Once it sticks and everyone is using it, then shut it down

~~~
vocatus_gate
It's sad but true. I can hardly trust any Google products any more because you
never know when they're randomly going to give it the axe for no apparent
reason.

------
bunnymancer
It's weird when Apple has the better messenger app.. Even more so when they
got into that position without actually changing anything..

------
drawkbox
Name a Google product that isn't search and gmail that hasn't been
discontinued after _n_ years. Google drive might hang around, and probably
Google Cloud (though it was mainly AppEngine for a longtime only). But there
is little faith in any Google platform if you are planning to build on it. I
am still pissed about Google Reader.

------
jwilk
[https://xkcd.com/1361/](https://xkcd.com/1361/)

------
dbg31415
I was terrified when I first read this, I thought it was "Google Voice" but
then I realized it wasn't... and couldn't for the life of me picture what
Google Talk was since... we have Google Hangouts and couldn't tell you the
last time I even saw "Google Talk" anywhere.

------
tmaly
For them its a very smart move, if its a non-core part of the business that is
not generating revenue, it makes sense.

From a user perspective, it is a bad play. Just like Google Reader, there were
users that relied on the software. While it may save them money, it hurts them
in other ways.

------
Markoff
and meanwhile I use for communication email, SMS and Skype longer than these
Google products, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber and Wechat exist

only thing I have added is Signal because why not have one more messenger if
it's bundled with SMS anyway

when living in China was forced to use Wechat but got rid off that spyware
immediately after moving outside, them had short stint with Facebook Messenger
(Lite) until I decided it's not worth to do any business with Facebook which
is reason why I don't have WhatsApp

I think I provide enough options for people to reach me with email, SMS, Skype
(video/chat), Signal (video/chat)

so in the end i have 4 apps in phone covering all my communication - AOSP
Email, AOSP Dialer, Skype Lite and Signal

------
gtirloni
At this point it would be better if they would just discontinue Talk,
Hangouts, Allo, Duo, etc, etc, etc and focus on a single communications app.
Give them a 6 month deadline and for the love of God, have a single app that I
can use for chat, voice and video.

~~~
Markoff
why insist on using Google products and not switch to Skype (lite) or Signal?

~~~
gtirloni
That's a good question.

Despite the awful UI, Skype serves me very well and I think they are improving
quickly on Linux.

The problem is none of my friends/family use it. Some have it installed but
they always use something else for chatting.

Nobody I know uses Signal.

~~~
Markoff
strange, nobody i know use Google to chat or video call, some members of our
family use Viber, i convinced few to Signal so they can talk to me, pretty
much everyone has Skype but most of the people use it just on desktop and then
when I would ask people around everyone use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger,
but Google communication apps are pretty much dead here around me in Europe
somewhere slightly higher than Signal but much much lower than Skype in
popularity

BTW what is so awful about Skype Lite interface? a bit more cluttered than
Viber, WhatsApp or Signal, but still ok compared to Messenger nobody has
problem with judging by popularity

~~~
gtirloni
It's not that everybody here is using Google apps. They aren't. They all use
WhatsApp or FB Messenger. But those options are terrible to me (particularly
because desktop clients are bad or non-existent)

The reasons I hope Google gets their act together is because they are in the
right place to do so. They have the mindshare, just need to execute better and
network effects may kick in. It also doesn't matter if they have the best
platform but none of my friends/family use it. Again, Google is better
positioned to make that happen, IMHO.

I don't know what Skype Lite is. I use Skype for Linux Alpha. Is that it? It
seems to be missing video calls, the chat interface is complicated (spent some
time trying to find the chat while in a voice call), it doesn't integrate well
with the desktop (it minimizes when I close, instead of hiding in the tray).
Like I said, they are improving.

As for Signal and converting people to some technology I know is better...
Sorry, tried that too many times. It's not worth the time invested. These
companies will have to figure out how to increase their market share without
depending on tech enthusiats.

~~~
Markoff
Skype Lite is Android app intended for India only, you can install it through
Yalp market or from Apk mirror, it's pretty much same as proper Skype, just 3
times smaller and should be lighter on data, not sure why Microsoft doesn't
officially allow it in other markets too since it can deal with your voice
calls, skype calls, SMS, chat so you could replace your dialer, your messaging
app and your Skype

Signal should be always introduced just as nice SMS/MMS app and add it can
also send encrypted chat messages if other party has Signal as well, because
what's the point having single purpose SMS app when you can have app providing
two options of delivering your messages, I think it's good way to sell Signal,
considering most of built in SMS apps are crap.

------
tlow
At what point are they going to cancel google voice to force us into hangouts.
The recent redesign makes me think not immediately, but initially with the G+
pushes they've held back functionality simply to force G+ products.

------
thekevan
My first thought was, "wait, which Google chat app is that?"

------
csours
Does anyone have a timeline of Google messaging app changes?

------
peapicker
"Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1
chats."

For me, this means it basically still exists and my user experience is the
same.

~~~
bigbugbag
Somehow this 1-on-1 chat has stopped working circa 2013 for me. People using
google still show up as online in my contact list but do not ever receive my
messages. On the other hand I do not appear in their contact list anymore.

------
bythckr
Gtalk was a great product like Google Reader.

Google is just proving how unreliable it is as a company. I have ditched by
Gmail account before they ditch me.

Same with Chrome too.

------
smokedoutraider
It seems like Google is constantly trying to simplify and streamline
everything for developers and giving a big middle finger to the users.

------
mads
Its like Google is becoming a Javascript framework.

------
zeveb
> we’ve evolved Hangouts to focus on two new experiences

> Google Talk launched in 2005 as a simple chat experience

To quote Inigo Montoya, 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means
what you think it means.'

> As part of our continued effort to focus Google+ around shared interests,
> we’re retiring two legacy Google+ features in Gmail: the ability to email
> Google+ profiles and the use of Google+ Circles.

Sad to see Circles die — that's what was compelling about Google+. I don't
even know what it is now.

~~~
zeveb
Why's this getting downvotes? I think that calling software & features
'experiences' rather than 'software' and 'features' is a symptom of precisely
what's wrong with Google's current direction.

------
hprotagonist
>XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be
supported starting June 26.

What does this actually mean?

~~~
WorldMaker
XMPP Federation allows servers to talk to each other similar to how email
works, and which is why XMPP addresses have always looked like email
addresses. Up until June 26 you could (with some effort) run a server on your
own domain and still chat with people on Google's XMPP servers.

------
williamle8300
Is anybody surprised anymore when Google shutters a project? It's almost like
their calling card.

------
WithHighProb
LOL years ago someone in mainland China copycat ICQ. Now the company he
founded is known as Tencent.

~~~
mads
Well, to be fair, WeChat is a pretty good application.

~~~
Markoff
your phone battery would beg to disagree plus no SMS implementation aside that
all content including private messages is monitored and censored

------
sunyc
This is mostly towards g suite enterprise offering.

