Google is killing another chat service | Hacker News Reader

Google is killing another chat service

support.google.com

37 pointspi-squared7 comments

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?

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.

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

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.

Agreed, and outside of the pure messaging aspect, it was a great way to quickly share music in the same place you were going to listen to it.

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.

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?!

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