Google's Disco is an iOS Trojan Horse | Hacker News Reader

Google's Disco is an iOS Trojan Horse

readwriteweb.com

20 pointsrwwmike14 comments

This assumes a lot about a pretty mundane app. It seems more like Google is letting Slide do its own thing within the company. It was only acquired half a year ago, I'd be shocked if this is a precursor to a feature baked into Android.

Would you, really? I think that Google has to do something to get into the ring on this one. Facebook bought Beluga. Google's just gonna stand by and do nothing?

You're talking about a category of application which very few people are even using at the moment. Both Facebook and Google buy a lot of companies.

They're not "doing nothing", they're letting a small team try to develop something, which seems a perfectly appropriate reaction. How often has Google jumped into a totally new category with any real conviction? They half-heartedly launched Buzz long after Twitter was a hit, they killed Wave, etc.

Yes, exactly. I was mentally enumerating all the meanings of the Trojan Horse allegory and wondering why this has anything to do with iOS in particular. Yet, I cat't see what the point of the OP is. It reads like the script of a horror movie missing the last ten pages.

Google pricked the group messaging territory with a little incomplete flag. Anything else I'm missing?

Actually curious on this point - is there an app for jailbroken iPhones to see what data is being sent out from your phone? A simple way? Packet sniffer with your phone's IP?

If you connect over wifi, you can easily sniff the packets from your router.

See Andy Baio's "How I Indexed The Daily" for information about using a proxy to monitor/inspect traffic from a device similar to an iPhone.

http://waxy.org/2011/02/how_i_indexed_the_daily/

You shouldn't say trojan horse in the computer field, it has too many connotations.

Interesting idea, but with msn, gtalk, facebook and the hopefully-still-upcoming BBM, multi-network clients should rule.

Is this app worth a download?

Is there any iOS app out there that come close to BBM? It seems that all the one I tried were very buggy.

Never used BBM, but have been pretty happy with both Beluga and GroupMe...though I'd say GroupMe is the one to go with, as Beluga got bought by Facebook.

From reading the article, it seems that it isn't, yet. The posited theory is that Android will eventually include the app in its default install, so at that point it might be worth installing if most of your friends are Android users. Until then, skip it.

(Yeah, totally not worth it.)

I've had good experiences with WhatsApp. Plus, it has become popular enough over here that most of the regular BBM users I know have WhatsApp installed as well.

I've heard Kik (http://www.kik.com/ works great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com