
Google is killing another chat service - pi-squared
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/12446824
======
Havoc
Yeah not surprised. Google - trillion dollar company can't seem to field a
coherent chat solution full stop.

Corporate side - google will always provide something that is vaguely
functional under whatever name/brand they call it this month

Personal side - I'll use whatsapp/fb messenger cause that's stable. Everyone's
on it too...because surprise it's not a complete shitshow.

As a whole I've given up on google fielding usable chat. Even sending a
screenshot over hangouts doesn't work depending on which of the 4 clients
(browser extension, cell, browser separate and gmail integrated) you're on to
this day. At one point the official corporate solution rolled out to 10s of
thousands of people - I kid you not - was a hacked together save it on drive,
share folder silently & send link over hangouts, click on link & open in
google drive to display picture.

How does a company manage to ship something as sophisticated as GCP but can't
get this right? Clearly they're not incompetent so wtf is going on there?

------
dangus
Interestingly, this feature is only two years old.

Can you think of another major social networking service without Direct
Messaging of some kind?

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Flickr, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pintrest, and
the list goes on, they all have DM functionality.

That sort of choice is disappointing because it's always nice to be able to
contact content creators. Without direct messaging it's more like cable
television where you're just there to watch and feedback isn't welcome.

Perhaps that's the idea here - YouTube will be the cable television of the
Internet era. Obscure channels aren't recommended by the algorithm and the
channels YouTube deems most profitable will be suggested.

~~~
supermdguy
Spotify used to have a direct message feature, but discontinued it.

~~~
ashtonbaker
I really dislike the absence of DMs on Spotify. It makes the whole social
aspect of Spotify seem so lacking, while music is an inherently social thing
for me. I would love to use Spotify chat to work on playlists, chat about
albums, etc.

~~~
pfranz
I don't use Spotify, and maybe I'm just old, but I hate every platform having
their own way to communicate. Especially when I want to look up something
later I have to search in 4 different places and hope their search isn't
terrible. There was one short period of time where Gaim/Pidgin/Adium worked.

I understand the benefits, but I feel like the main reason these are viable is
because email was ruined.

------
nikolay
As I've said many times before, I only use Google services without
alternatives. Fortunate, most of their stuff has even better alternatives
today. For example, video chat is times worse than Microsoft Teams. Outlook is
better than Gmail already. Airtable and Coda - better than Google Sheets. And
so on. Their cloud computing offering is also lagging behind. In general, does
Google do anything decently outside of hardware and spying on people and
selling them out?!

