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Did you also notice that Google's messaging system pretty much died out around that point in favor of Skype and similar?

I used to see people mention GTalk all the time, but I haven't seen anything similar in years. No one has mentioned G+ or Allo. That decision by Google may have been the thing that killed its user base.

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Hangouts (which I think GTalk turned into) still has some usage - certainly as a quick video conf call solution, and somewhat for text messaging. It definitely doesn't seem to have much of a future though since Google released a bunch of other competing chat applications.

It's unfortunate because Hangouts is still really awesome. It works really well for video chat (including group chat), but more importantly it works great with multiple devices. I can get a message on my phone, laptop or PC, and reply anywhere, with the conversation and notifications synchronized. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it's really nice to be able to just send someone a link from my PC, for example.

It looks like Telegram has multi-device support, but then this kind of thing scares me:

> Q: How are you going to make money out of this?

> We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.

> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram.

That's not very compelling in terms of investing my effort to switch.

No, it turned into Hangouts, which is alive and kicking, specially for companies using Google Apps.

But really only internally, at least in my experience

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