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> Google was pretty infamous for doing this (how many IM systems have they built now? 8?)

Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is.

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it'll probably be nearly the same thing, renamed, that does an oauth url dance that breaks 40% of the time. it'll have even fewer useful buttons, all hidden until you hover over hidden icons, and those buttons won't do anything the previous hangouts did before. there will likely be a few people that get big bonuses and promotions out of it as well, and they'll write up post-mortems from afar after they've been poached by some new vc-funded darling.

Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts.

Mine still get forwarded just fine. I wonder what fresh hell porting my Google Voice number over to another carrier will be.

I definitely worry about this, I've had this phone number for almost 20 years now.

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