Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

> It works. It’s better than anything Google has attempted. The problem is, it’s not good enough.

This is wrong. Google had a very good messaging system, Google Talk. It worked really well, was based on open standards, supported federation, video/audio calls and was making its way into smartphones. For example, the Nokia 770-N9 series supported Google Talk as early as Q2 2006. Calls based on an open standard in a smartphone, already in 2006...

However, internal politics at Google led to the discontinuation of Google Talk in favor of a long stream of confusing and half-finished attempts: Google Chat, Hangouts, Duo, Spaces, Allo and Meet. I've lost track of how many different services they have come up with. Apparently there's more of them I didn't even know about [1]. It's comical and sad, since the first one was great and had tons of users thanks to being embedded into Gmail.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

View on HN

They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.

> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.

Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.

What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?

From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.

I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.

That sounds like the stories we used to hear of Microsoft. It only took them like, what, 2 decades to get things back together?

It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal.

With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.

With mobile they lost on all the line.

> They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards.

And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.

I've always felt that the shuttering of Google Reader really was the end of an "age" of the web. We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups to the super closed gardens of the social platforms. F'ing painful.

You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it.

The worst of both worlds.

Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.

It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.

I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price.

...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...

I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options.

It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.

The same strategy was pursued with Android. It was open-source, but Google set up the Open Handset Alliance with OEMs in 2007 and one of the membership stipulations were that OEMs could not create competing OSes based on forks of the open source code.

Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.

How Samsung stay on while selling Tizen OS?

Tizen is a Linux foundation project, it's not an Android fork. In any case, Samsung can always arrange for preferential treatment as they are the flagship OEM.

> Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem

but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?

There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.

There were a lot more rss readers popping up and/or getting more attention immediately after Reader shut down. Feedly was one of the earlier winners for example.

Inoreader is good Google Reader replacement (at least for me).

Even if Google revived Reeder, I'd still use NewsBlur over it. Once burned, twice shy.

> We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups

I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)

And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!

I feel like doing stupid comparisons right now. Feedbin, The Old Reader, or even running a feed aggregator on your own computer are like the sound of a tree falling in the woods. They're also not like The Matrix, because not only they can't be explained but the people who still complain about Google Reader don't understand them when they see them themselves.

yes, but all lack design that would inspire the mainstream. Being niche is fine but the reader was big with multiplicators like journalists etc.

You don't get them with wholemeal bread.

I use Feedly, which is pretty nicely designed (it has other drawbacks, but it looks and feels like a modern, proper app).

The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.

Inoreader provides more value than Feedly at a fraction of the costs.

really?

I use Feedly’s free version, but thanks for the tip!

RSS has changed as well. Earlier, the RSS feed could be the entire article or blog post. Then it changed to include ads. Then it changed to a snippet of the article or just the headline with some ads. Every change made it worse for usability.

I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.

The RSS didn't change. It's 100% on every content creator to decide what to include in an RSS item. Some decide to put only a snippet, hoping to lead you to their full website to show you ads. It has been this since the earliest days of RSS.

All three platforms you mentioned, Hugo, Blogspot and Wordpress have RSS enabled by default.

end of Reader didn't kill blogging, Social Media killed blogging by effectively allowing anyone to blog with zero effort. FB and Twitter are or were where the majority of discussion was happening.

If it could be killed by the removal of a single app then it was not actually a viable culture in the first place.

Google buzz and Google wave are also casualties.

Did anyone miss wave? I found it to be a solution looking for a problem, which it eventually found in gsuite which is successful.

I actually think Wave was a bit before it's time and couldn't really find a place to settle. It kind of reminds me of the laser. At first, it was a fun playtoy but no one had any real uses for it. Over time, it became more and more important until now it's ingrained in almost everything we do.

Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.

It was weird, Wave's main reason for existing is for businesses with massive email chains of 100 versions of a document, but they killed it about a month after enabling it for business accounts

I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.

You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.

The amount of time we all spent getting the G+ unified-account thing through every system! But that and Photos are the two good results of the work.

It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world.

I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.

I sometimes wonder if Mozilla conspires to drive Firefox into the ground.

But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.

It’s plausible deniability

Good point :-)

But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around:

Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

It is as correct to say that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. The difference between these claims and Hanlon's Razor is that the razor warns against assuming the malice in the absence of evidence.

Stupidity is malice when you are supposed to be competent.

I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is.

How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.

Mozilla might have been the doctor at one point but now they’ve morphed into the politician. The Google gravy train has utterly destroyed Mozilla’s ability to innovate. The whole culture over there has become completely corrupt and self-indulgent and the good ones have either left or been let go. Sad days.

Take it up with Hanlon.

Having Firefox around for just a few hundred million per year is convenient for Google to not have Chrome considered a monopoly (although Edge getting back the market somehow changes it). Anyway it feels like it would be stupid and potentially more costly for them to do moves to sabotage Firefox. It's like an insurance.

Good points.

But the big question is if there is an agreement or "understanding" or something that Google only pays as long as Firefox doesn't become a threat, i.e.:

- don't fix the plugin ecosystem

- don't fix theming

- don't get too far ahead technically (i.e. a good reason to get rid of the servo team)

- don't claim too much authority (i.e. get rid of MDN)

Of course this is wild speculation and mostly in jest.

Like a hyperactive toddler that wants all the toys his friends have.

Nokia N900 was my best instant messaging experience ever.

I had Google Talk, Skype, my country's Gadu-Gadu and later Facebook chat in the same app! The same uniform interface with SMS. I had one simple button to switch protocols. I could also easily see online status of my contact on all of these (and fall back to SMS if they weren't online).

The Nokia N950 was a dream phone, too bad it got killed because of internal company politics.

I had this too. Too bad normal users didnt value this.

When I showed it to friends at the time they were mostly confused about it, or didnt "get" the value of it.

There is absolutely a value in it. I'm using my phone mainly for communication and I could kill for a physical keyboard, especially for a vertical slider like the old Blackberry Priv.

There is the F(x)tec Pro1X [0] which looks similar to the Nokia N900. It's a little bit too expensive for the specs (about 740€ for the 8GB/256GB version with Snapdragon 662), but could be a nice phone.

Or maybe OnwardMobility will succeed and release the new Blackberry this year and it won't be a piece of crap. /s

[0] https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x

Oh Google Talk was sweet :)

Also about Duo - even though I agree that it's kinda half-assed, strange interface app, it consistently has lower latency and better video quality than WhatsApp or Signal. I use it wherever my contact has it.

I'll second that. I have found it to have the best quality of all video calling alternatives and handle low bandwidth situations the best too. The interface is weird but focusing on just one thing and doing it well feels like a good choice.

You can walk out of your house and the call seamlessly switches from WiFi to cellular. Try doing that with WhatsApp or Signal.

> with WhatsApp

I don't know about Signal because I don't use it but WhatsApp is also pretty good at that job. It also helps if one lives in a country/on a continent with a decent mobile internet service, I guess the US is not the best in that domain.

Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age? You only do that if there's something urgent, text is the way.

> WhatsApp is also pretty good at that job

Definitely not. And the US does have pretty decent mobile internet.

> Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age?

People who have their social anxiety under control. When I was younger I wanted to talk to the opposite sex on the phone so I could hear their voice and flirt with them. Maybe the younger generation gets turned on by emojis and memes?

Google Meet does that. Confirmed it just yesterday. However it couldn't tolerate cellular network blackouts for a minute or two while on-the-go.

> However it couldn't tolerate cellular network blackouts for a minute or two.

No shit. QUIC is great but doesn't work when the Internet is unreachable.

I mean couldn't it be solved on software side to automatically reconnect when I'm back online? Software developers are ingenious about working around the limitations of protocols and physics.

I may be walking outside with gloves in a freezing temperature not excited about taking phone out. But actually I was in train so no issues. Second time I was cut off when I was walking and explaining things for a few minutes... only to realize I'm dropped out of conversation - again I needed to manually reconnect by explicitly tapping on that button.

Google Hangouts was almost there as well. At least in my circle it was actually fairly popular too.

The mobile app really sucks though, especially when compared to Telegram.

I could never understand how to use it personally, people would sometimes message me from gmail, I was utterly confused. I never used it because of that.

At one point I had my Google Voice number tied to Hangouts, so SMS came through that app, and maybe one or two friends that also used Hangouts. I was never sure what client or integration they used, because it always seemed disjointed, like the app was made for someone else and I was an edge case so many of the features didn't make sense or didn't work, but I assume they did for someone. The most confusing part was the contacts tab, which had recommended contacts at the top instead of alphabetic ordering. It never made sense. It had about 50% numbers with no name associated. I assume just phone numbers of businesses I dialed at some point. The rest were a mixture of people I've emailed before but never called, someone I messaged frequently, and a bunch of people I haven't communicated with in any way since before Hangouts was even a thing, which I can't fathom why a recommender would decide I might want to call them now.

I wonder if the management at google actually use their products. If they did, there is no way they would allow them to be killed.

Apple's senior staff definitely use their products.

Disclaimer: I am a Googler voicing my own opinions about our products.

Google really does use all of its own products internally. In fact, I've had a FAR better experience inside Google than outside of it. When 100% of your work happens on chat/gmail/docs/other internal tools, it's pretty seamless. We rarely dogfood external use cases though, where users don't fully drink the Kool-Aid.

So do you guys just constantly switch all the time when they kill the products? That must be maddening.

They definitely use gsuite products all the time and in most cases exclusively (i.e. nobody uses Powerpoint, everyone uses Google Slides), but in other verticals (e.g. phones or laptops) it's not so clear cut.

This article is quite frustrating in a few ways because I feel like it misses the point on both sides of the fence:

Google’s ethos was clearly to throw a bunch of teams at the problem and see what sticks. From a planning perspective it might seem sensible but for the user it’s deeply confusing: they just want to know from Google which one app is blessed and will be supported for the long haul so they can get on with their day.

Apple OTOH absolutely nailed this. Messages is there, it’s always been there. Sure the i was removed from the word but it was still the same app. Simple, direct, everyone on the same protocol without any confusion.

In terms of the complaints about things like tapbacks - The last thing I want is more than a single row of reactions. The point is for them to be simple and universally understood instantly.

Google's stock Android Messages app has been consistently good for the last few years. Simple interface that doesn't try to do too much - good search functionality and a web client if you'd like to send SMS/RCS from your computer.

I generally like the app, but I find the search to be hit or miss, and it kills me that I cannot search at all in the web client. It would also be trivial for them to coordinate backups of your messages, but this functionality requires a 3rd party app.

I remember google talk. There was a time when everything Google released was hip, minimalist, fast and to the point. Google search, maps, Gmail, hangout.

How things have changed.

Google Talk was originally just XMPP. Or at least XMPP compatible. I suppose that was too open for them.

They blamed their competitor's embrace/extend/extinguish behavior to pull out of it (IIRC MS and perhaps others had asymmetric compatibility with Google talk, and that's how they justified making Google talk proprietary).

I was using jabber to connect to gtalk. I suppose that was unacceptable as well.

I still miss Talk because was so easy and intuitive...

I liked its simplicity. It was an efficient app designed for one purpose and did it well.

Yes, and messages could be found by Gmail search. Simpler times.

We basically built our first startup communicating over GTalk. Slack was not a thing. Some people were using Skype but GTalk was simple and it worked just fine.

Google talk was a nice small piece of software running on a computer with limited features comparing with Skype. Even with Gmail auto loading Google talk web app, it did not gain enough traction say replace Skype or MSN messenger.

Saying it is a good mobile phone app is a huge exaggeration, I had used it back in the 2008 era, the experience was horrible, almost exact opposite of “it just works”.

I could be way off base, but I vaguely remember Google Talk being unreliable across multiple clients, something we take for granted now.

I remember that at some point it felt exceptional that I could switch between Nokia N9 and browser on my desktop, continue the same chat and get new message notifications on the right device. But the integration broke a lot and of course shutting down Talk broke it completely.

To be fair I don't remember any chat client having figured that out at that time.

I imagine being a product manager at google is a special type of hell

I wouldn't say so... It pays well and has relatively little accountability (proof: look at how many chat apps failed while PMs congratulated themselves launching them). You might not be able to have any meaningful impact but you won't suffer much consequences either. Heck if you play your cards right you may even land the CEO spot.

Hah great response. I guess if impact doesn't matter then it sounds wonderful

Mobile technology evolved very quickly but XMPP did not. I remember using Pidgin to chat on Google Talk. Then Google decided (rightly) that more secure auth was needed, and implemented an XEP to add OIDC authentication. Now third-party clients had to decide whether they wanted to implement Google's auth, or not. Ultimately it is easier to control the protocol and the app--and along with those, the tracking, the display of ads, the feature set, and so on.

That's the fundamental problem, non standard products can iterate way faster than standards based products.

Look at all the new features email has!

Of course as we're on HN we obviously hate anything but plain text, but that's not true of most people

I mean, does E-mail need new features? I’d argue that it is successful and ubiquitous because it doesn’t change and have a half dozen companies breaking compatibility by trying to out-feature each other. Th Internet could use more applications like E-mail and fewer like the chat mess we have.

Chat should be the deadest-simplest protocol/app on the planet. It’s sending text… That’s pretty much the first thing a developer learns how to do when they learn network programming. We should be able to send text from one computer to another in a way that is compatible no matter what company’s client you use. Yet nothing has managed to gain traction.

Well, it got html and rtf and attachments bodged into it, and never got encryption working.

And it's plagued with spam and attacks and fakes.

Chat is sending text, and files, and encryption, and now doing all that to groups of people, which means you need group managers and permissions, and authentication of those users. Might as well add video and audio calls now you have an address book, as phone companies can't do that properly it seems

All that is left to do now really is figure out ways to make deploying something similar easy for the average user without Google.

I really can't stand texting personally. It astonishes me how much it's a step backwards in innovation for the convenience of companies being able to target and index conversations that people think are private better. Yet still, even voice recognition can't recognize when I say names of my friends that are from foreign countries, and it doesn't connect me with strangers that speak other languages. I think our tech focus on typed text has really stunted the growth of tech in the past few years a lot, also it does nothing to make sure our interaction become easier with differences in learning capabilities and disabilities that exist in our society.

It's really a shame that voice recognition hasn't been pushed further because of all the effort put into requiring everyone to use tiny phone keyboards and frustrating emojis just to convey a message and then waiting for someone else to respond in a way that completely distracts people during normal activities like driving or crossing a street.

It's simply not good progress to continue down that texting-based/focused path in my opinion for future progress.

Text is much less disruptive to the people around you and also private. I probably would not be comfortable reading out most of my texts aloud without thinking twice even if recognition were perfect.

(But it is not really just text. People send multimedia content all the time.)

I understand your point, but there are numerous advancements like noise cancelling and other things that would be better developed if we weren't so focused on texting. For example, a phone could emit a static (non-irritating) tone to isolate spoken communication and then filter it out of voice communication. Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations to allow for call privacy as well.

At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.

Texting is asynchronous. If I have a question for you I can send it when I think about it and you can respond when you have time.

If I call you, it's basically me saying "What I want is more important than what you're doing right now". Sometimes I may still want to do that, but certainly not always.

I find it really annoying when someone insists on having a long back and forth conversation over text that could be handled in two minutes with a call, but there are a lot of things that don't justify calling someone.

There's also the documentation factor. Being able to reference previous conversations is desirable in some cases.

Texting is also interruptable. If something happens around me, I can look around and then go back and catch the train of thought. If I'm on a call or listening to a voice message and there's a loud noise, I've lost the sentance. Sure, I can ask the other party to repeat, or repeat the message (or even worse, try to get it to go back just enough), but if there's a lot of interruptions, I may never get the information.

> Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations

yes! the "Cone of Silence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence_(Get_Smart)

We need more of these!

> For example, a phone could emit a static (non-irritating) tone to isolate spoken communication and then filter it out of voice communication.

As if our cities were not loud enough. You might also find out that a noise that is not irritating to some parts of the populations are unbearable to others. This sounds like a very high tech solution in search of a problem, whilst the obvious answer is simple: just use text messages.

> Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations to allow for call privacy as well.

So we have to isolate into some specific infrastructure to send a message? What am I supposed to do if I am late and in a packed train, for example?

> At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.

What would sending audio messages change? Installing microphones in a finite set of booths sounds much more tractable than putting cameras (with a resolution high enough to make individual characters on a smartphone screen visible; none of them do that today) everywhere we can write messages. Voice recognition is accurate enough that you would not need any transcript to extract information from intercepted messages.

Frankly, you sound like you have a personal issue with text messages, which is fine, but none of what you wrote makes any sense.

Google Talk had message delivery issues on bad networks. iMessage still works there.

It didn't have E2E encryption, sync across devices or work as a transparent(-ish) SMS substitute/overlay. It was more of a nice but late-to-the-party AIM clone, which wasn't really the direction of instant messaging was headed. Google's IM strategy was and is a mess but gchat wasn't even in the same category of messenger by the time Apple got serious about iMessage.

> the first one was great

the curse of too much money at hand. New hires urge to innovate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com