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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of Google services have been killed/deprecated, even when they were widely used and popular. Google reader, hangout, gtalk, come to mind. I'm wary of getting burned again.

So I have decided I will never use any google service for something that I really need to rely on. I have a throwaway gmail for giving out to all kinds of spammy websites. I use google photos for backup but also do a full backup on Onedrive. I have a play music subscription but that's not very sticky anyway, I can switch to Apple music at the first sign of trouble.

Also, if you work for google, I'm surprised you think there is no precedent for google discontinuing stuff! It's literally a meme at this point.

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It seems to be a bit of an internet meme, but as another poster noted, the original logic seems to have been lost, and it's now simply cool to quote the meme.

You say plenty of Google services have been killed - and you cite 3. But only 1 of those has actually been killed.

Google Reader was shutdown - this is somewhat personal, as I was a bit lover of Google Reader as well. However, there was 12 months of notice for the deprecation, there were provisions for migration/exporting all your data - and there were reasons mentioned at the time for why it was deprecated. Basically, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.

Hangouts wasn't discontinued...in fact, I use it as my main chat application currently (both in my personal life, and at work).

GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).

> the original logic seems to have been lost

I don't know, Google reader is still not up. What logic is lost?

> Hangouts wasn't discontinued

It is abandoned, which is worse than dicontinued. No new features, some features have been removed. Apparently it's "enterprise" focused now.

> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements

Wrong. Read up about this tiny thing called federation. Hangouts is a small, walled-garden subset of gtalk. And even hangouts is deprecated now (at least for consumers). Now if you're a consumer and want to use a google service for chat, you have allo. Allo is a dumbed down subset of hangouts. No multi-device support, no web app, no voice, no sms integration, no video. It has stickers though. Guess some people are fine with that. I'm not.

> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).

How's that XMPP federation coming along?

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