We’re winding down Google Talk | Hacker News Reader

We’re winding down Google Talk

support.google.com

216 pointstech234a228 comments

If nothing else, it's impressive that they've actually managed to migrate those Google Talk users over the years (myself included in that, albeit less than I used to). They probably did so extremely begrudgingly, but the path went something like:

Google Talk -> Hangouts -> Google Chat

People I added years ago are still reachable in Chat, which I guess is nice (in spite of everything else).

And Google Chat is pretty decent IMO if you're committed to Google Workspace. How you use it is probably a bit cultural. Where I work--or at least the teams I interact with--it seems to have developed into use Chat if you want a somewhat near-time response rather than email. At least the people I know rarely text these days and essentially never call on voice. Group chats vary by context.

The UX is absolutely horrendous. Don’t even get me started about the 4096 character limit or the fact that URLs in code blocks breaks the code block.

How about not being able to sort the user list by whatever order you want or folding groups? What about it creating “Spaces” for chats with more than one contact and forcing you to “leave” if you want to hide it to keep your list clean?

Maybe we should talk about how they recently started capturing, poorly, formatted text when you paste, forcing a paste with match style to strip it and no way to remove that default.

Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app.

Maybe we could add in there’s no user configuration ability at all.

Fuck Google Chat. It’s a horrendous piece of shit and it needs to die, not third party support.

>Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app.

I don't need more apps. Unless there's a compelling reason to have one, I'd much rather be able to sit down at any PC and have the same experience. (I do have the app installed on my phone for notifications but I have those turned off on my PCs anyway.)

I don't really need chat apps in general. You can send me an email but Gchat is fine because it's integrated with Gmail.

No one’s against the existence of a web app.

But most people seem to prefer the desktop versions of chat apps.

They really should have both.

I'm still annoyed at how the "Markdown" syntax in Google Chat is not following the CommonMark specifications.

Indeed, while not ideal, generally they've had a decent migration path. At least for the "message someone inside Gmail" usecase, as far as people are concern, for most people nothing has changed other than some slight UI. Outside of Gmail (especially on android) it is not as clean though.

Hangouts worked excellently for so many years, even after most transitioned out of Talk (aka 3rd party clients) -- available in gmail, available on web, working app etc. Actually with Chat appearing on the scene the transition has been pretty seemless also, with Hangouts still working on web if you wanted it to, and interchangable with Chat versions.

Who says that they managed it? I went from Google Talk to Hangouts to no Google Services aside from Play store, kept only because of Android devices... Ideally I would not rely on any Google services, but it is not feasible for me...

I love Google but at this point I always expect them to drop support for anything.

What would it take for you to not love them anymore? They're like a friend who is always making plans, then bailing at the last minute.

A cohesive suite of products mimicking microsoft connected to my inbox and a text feature :D preferbly with around 10+ years of my data.

I can't lie, its a heavy moat.

If maps started sucking I'd leave. We'll see how bad the new advertising features get. But right now it's just head and shoulders above anything else.

It depends on what you're using it for. Maybe it's the best for finding things like restaurants, looking up business hours, reviews, things like that. Basically a spatial view of points of interests. But as a map I find it very lacking, mainly because of their color scheme, but they're also missing data lite small roads, paths, small lakes. White roads on light gray is difficult to see, and overall it's very low contrast. Which is strange, because they have bragged multiple times of using ML to automatically classify areas and coloring them correctly, but it's only used when zoomed out.

Compare these images and see which map style you prefer: https://imgur.com/a/419XB50

Here Maps is best out of those screenshots, but none of them are great.

What I can't stand about Google Maps is how it hides so much stuff if you're not zoomed in 1000x. The worst time was when I was trying to trace a 100km long logging road in northern British Columbia to get to a provincial camp site on a lake, but as soon as I zoomed out to get a broader picture it would disappear. Even though that was the only road within a 15 km radius. Nope, you can only see a 1km section at a time, and it's so thin and low-contrast that it's barely visible.

Next time you need to map out roads like that, try Caltopo. For any _map_ use cases, things like Caltopo and Gaia are miles better. Google Maps is great for following directions they give you, or finding businesses and well known places, but it's a horrible map in any other context.

There is of course a reason for Google maps very low contrast visual style, the focus is not on being a road map: https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...

Maps on Android for me became painfully slow. Every time I went to use it, I'd stare at a half-drawn screen for ages. I had a few year old flagship Android phone and that sort of experience was just silly. Google has heaped more and more into Maps, trying to make it do everything, and it has become a resource hogging monstrosity. When I open Maps, I want to quickly search for something and then likely navigate to it. Not wait for even the screen to get drawn, then wait for autocomplete, then wait for the map to draw, etc.

There are also some really bizarre choices in how the UI works. I don't remember exactly, but I believe when you search, you get a wildly zoomed out regional view, and then when you click on a specific result...you're still stuck at the very zoomed out view. So in order to see if you clicked on the right result, you have to pull the map waaaaaay in.

I just found myself baffled at how bad the usability was. Did the people running Maps actually watch people using their product?

Yes, Maps is the best I've used. I had Apple maps on the other day. I knew the area and knew I was close to the destination. A left turn and about 100 yards down the road. Apple wanted to take me nearly a mile north and then loop back. It does that kind of stuff all the time.

I haven't compared Google Maps to a dedicated device like a Garmin. I wonder how that would do.

My biggest fear, that’s already half realized, is that enough mapping companies go out of business that a ton of map building knowledge just vanishes and it takes decades to have decent solution rise again when Maps finally goes under.

I fear that in particular for local mapping, as right now outside of OSM the only companies putting serious effort in maps are US and China based (to my knowledge at least)

Maps was solid but I'm so sick of seeing: this alternative route will get you there 2 hours slower.

This is interesting as ~3 years ago, I made the switch to Apple Maps because Google Maps started becoming something like "Google Travel" instead.

As someone who enjoyed smaller screens, the app started getting cluttered with attractions, reviews, and various icons in way of UI and map elements.

I would switch to Apple Maps if there was an easy way to use it on Windows. Apple has no supported Maps website, though you can view Apple Maps through DuckDuckGo. But that's clunky and doesn't solve my use case of mapping routes on my desktop computer and then pulling them up in Apple Maps on my iPhone.

Google would have to break up with me.

I own Google stock, I have Google Nest security, Chromecast, Chromebook, Pixel phone, Google Voice, YouTube Music, YouTube TV,... Google Domains... Google Router, ... I had Google Waves, G+, Google Video (before they acquired YouTube), Orkut, ...

I just try to be pragmatic. Google didn't have an easy option to just video chat with my wife with one click so I just bought an iPad to FaceTime.

I forgot about Google Inbox, I loved that. Google Reader RIP. Google Desktop Search was great, especially how you could extend it. Google Answers (that's how my Google Account was verified)

so like, google lives in LA?

The problem with chat is that every big tech company is only interested in "winning" vs driving usage. Google would be better off fighting for open standards to improve their position in this market. Open standards in the 70s, 80s, and 90s did such great things for technology.

yes, in theory XMPP should have won everything (with clients built on top) -- but there's this other thing of users being so dumb/wool over the eyes about new flashy apps and not understanding "texting" as SMS vs internet based messaging and international differences meant stupid closed things like WhatsApp took off and none are the wiser. Ridiculous to this day that WhatsApp conned so many people into thinking they were getting 'free texting' by basically making the accounts phone numbers, even tho there's no connection to cell networks/SMS. Arrgh. Not to mention a similar sort of confusion with iMessage. But its so hard to counter momentum and social circle movement with these things and ppl's willingness/unwillingness to jump apps or run ten messaging apps crazily.

Consumers don't care if the text goes through cell networks or the internet. They don't even care if the message appears in WhatsApp or their messages app. All they care about is sending a message or an image to a phone number and they want the cheapest and fastest way to do that. So they aren't as stupid as they appear

They are not stupid they are shallow.

and we the ppl have a right to it.

i.e. i don't want to be an electrical engineer to be able to operate a light switch. i don't care about the certifications of the cabling or the switch or in which way the electrons were produced - i want the lights on.

Pretty sure I have never payed WhatsApp a single cent in the last 10 years so I don't see how I've been conned.

Hell how to get WhatsApp profitable seems to befuddle Facebook.

Ten years ago WhatsApp was a paid app on the App Store. They changed it to an annual subscription model (with plenty of loopholes to skip the payment), and then about 6 years ago they finally made it free.

Announcement of changing from upfront paid to subscription: https://blog.whatsapp.com/i-phone-v2-10-1-release-notes

Announcement of removing the subscription altogether: https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-use...

Yes exactly. Almost no WhatsApp users have ever paid anything for it.

every wa user volunteers his message meta-data and probably the contents of their address book

> Hell how to get WhatsApp profitable seems to befuddle Facebook.

Facebook, the company that never charges for anything and makes money off data and ads? You are thinking you never paid for WhatsApp after using it for a decade?

I am. The only remotely valuable data WhatsApp makes available to Facebook is contact lists, and frankly they already have all that data.

WhatsApp is definitely losing them money, but it's obviously more than worth a small loss to have control over the messaging system that most of the world uses. Facebook doesn't want Google or whoever to get a popular social app and leverage that to move into spaces that Facebook actually makes money.

So I guess in a sense you could way we're indirectly paying for it via Facebook ads (if you actually use Facebook).

Well, they have "business WhatsApp" and now the infrastructure is built out and the apps are mature, I really wonder how much investment it actually takes. WhatsApp was a famously lean operation. Maybe 50 people at the time it was acquired, and the apps have hardly changed in years. I bet it can or does run with a skeleton crew. The competition is hardly intense.

I assume Facebook derives a lot of value from traffic analysis. Knowing who you talk to, when and for how long has value.

Unless you think that FB won't start serving you mortgage ads once they see you calling realtors

> Pretty sure I have never payed WhatsApp a single cent in the last 10 years so I don't see how I've been conned.

You gave up your privacy, which is worth a lot more than a few cents.

I did too, unfortunately. There's no way most people can be convinced to use anything else than the tool that connects them with the highest number of users, so when I had to install something on a old tablet to plan rehearsals with my old band I had no other choice than Whatsapp.

>You gave up your privacy, which is worth a lot more than a few cent

Not to me. So I really didn't give up anything.

this isn't about the money! it's about a basic messaging app that was unnecessary when major players were already available ala Google Talk, iMessage, even FB Messenger, and what drew a ton of ppl to WhatsApp especially internationally was that it said it was 'free texting' and ppl believed it because it used phone numbers as User IDs. But all it was was a basic internet messaging chat app and enough internationals in like India and stuff started using it that North Americans (where texting is super cheap and a non-issue) were eventually lured into using it just to try to keep in touch with ppl. While they all had gmail accounts and stuff already and could have used Hangouts or Microsoft or FB or whatever. WhatsApp just got random momentum and got lucky.

I guess what OP meant was you were conned by the impression that you get free "texting", while it's not actually texting (in the sense of SMS) but a propriatery protocol.

The things Whatsapp brought to the scene you couldn't do with SMS at the time. Everyone knew that.

No idea about MMS my country shut that service off years ago and I never used it.

XMPP wasn't a great protocol for mobile.

The dependence on supporting extensions to get features like push messaging from servers to work efficiently was a problem.

Good point! I think the EU is gonna force Apple to open up Messages, in which case Apple Messages will become the _de facto_ standard.

But not many people use iMessages in EU to begin with. Its more of an American thing because of history of texting and the iMessage color phenomenon.

It's very much a US-centric thing.

Rest of the world is bemused by the stories of bullied US teenagers who don't have 'the right' bubble colour on their SMS-ish app. Elsewhere we've all been using whatsapp/telegram/signal etc for years and we're never going back.

I think maybe the worst decision Apple made was not trying to push out their service (with maybe a few limitations to upsell the hardware) - although I guess blackberry tried to do that and it didn't work out.

> Rest of the world is bemused by the stories of bullied US teenagers who don't have 'the right' bubble colour on their SMS-ish app. Elsewhere we've all been using whatsapp/telegram/signal etc for years and we're never going back.

I mean, I wouldn't install any FB software on my phone. I'm not sure "we just use WhatsApp" is the flex you think it is.

But the "US teenagers bullied" is one of those BS stories that is blown out of proportion because in a country roughly the size of the EU, you can find a lot of idiots. And US news loves stories about how your children are in some kind of peril - often peer related.

Good points all, but the issues are real wrt interoperability. I switched from iPhone to pixel and it was a huge pain in the ass for my friends and family, 90% of whom are iPhone.

The silly thing is it would be easy to fix this from Apple's side. They know if a phone has connected to the messaging backend in X days, they could easily fall back to SMS if the recipient hasn't connected in say a week, and then keep using SMS until a phone for that user reconnects.

They choose not to deliberately to tie people into iPhones.

>they could easily fall back to SMS

Apple does do that.

They provide a toggle (defaults to off) not to fall back to SMS. Which makes sense as an option, because it would suck to send what you think is E2E encrypted and then find out it went in clear text.

blackberry's effort wasn't honest. They only opened it up after their platform had been bleeding users for a while.

If they were first to market with an app for android and ios I feel like things might have gone very differently.

> blackberry tried to do that and it didn't work out

Blackberry blew it by not trying to do that till blackberry was dead. then once the whole world had migrated to a different solution they brought out their messenger. Whatsapp at best was a clone of blackberry messenger.

The time to open up your standard is at the top, not after everyone is / has abandoned you for the "next thing".

Some of it is probably history in US. Texting used to be very expensive.

Admittedly, I couldn't even tell you what I pay--if anything--in non-iMessage texts these days on a bog-standard AT&T plan but it's not something enough to take note of and I don't take the color into any account when texting.

I feel like texting was unlimited by the time iMessage became prominent. At least I do not recall text costs being a concern for domestic texts anytime in the 2010s.

I do remember international texting costs driving adoption of WhatsApp though. It was a killer app that everyone knew how to instantly use, not have spam, and the contacts/pics/video/group sharing just worked across all phone OSs.

Edit: In fact, the exact opposite is what I think happened. Texting was unlimited in the US, or effectively unlimited because it was so cheap, that people in the US did not bother to look into a non default SMS/MMS apps to message others, since Americans are mostly contacting other Americans.

All the people I knew who had international contacts jumped on WhatsApp, but a huge portion of Americans never contact anyone outside America, so they never cared about international messaging costs, and never bothered with WhatsApp/Viber/Tango/Skype/whatever other chat app was out there to bypass text costs.

This gave Apple an advantage because they can implement their own iMessage in the default SMS/MMS app, and ramp people up onto iMessage without people even choosing it.

> I feel like texting was unlimited by the time iMessage became prominent. […] In fact, the exact opposite is what I think happened. Texting was unlimited in the US

No I don’t think this is accurate. I remember US cell providers charging for text message when iMessage was released. iMessage mattered to me initially, and I did use iMessage WiFi texting to avoid SMS charges and overages. Here’s an article from 2013 (two years after iMessage started) talking about telcos deciding to stop charging. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2486212/at-t--t-mobile... Don’t forget that at the time there was a big distinction between SMS and MMS (anything longer than 160 chars, anything with images, movies or audio, etc.

I have no doubt that WhatsApp, in addition to iMessage, contributed to the telcos realizing that charging for messaging was no longer a good idea. But messaging was not effectively unlimited before iMessage came around.

You may recall correctly, but that article is about Premium SMS, something I did not even know about. But it does not say anything about SMS/MMS.

This link from Jul 2012 says ATT/Verizon were offering unlimited talk and text at that time:

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/att-shared-data-plan/

This link from Dec 2015 claims 90% of people had unlimited plans and they started being offered a few years ago:

>But in the last few years, “Unlimited Talk and Text” has become an increasingly common phrase.

https://instantcensus.com/blog/almost-90-of-americans-have-u...

2015 is long after iMessage started, and “unlimited plans” were something that you had to pay a premium price for, they cost extra money. When iMessage first came out, unlimited texting was not available on the standard/budget plans, and today it is.

I mean, WiFi texting was a selling point of iMessage for a reason. They made a big deal out of being able to send messages for free. From my perspective in the US, I wasn’t even aware of WhatsApp at the time, and so it felt like iMessage was the primary force causing telcos to back off. (That and the fact that charging for SMS was stupid because the cheaper alternatives used more bandwidth.) WhatsApp might have in reality been a larger force, but I’m skeptical because WhatsApp was an app you had to go get, while iMessage was the built-in default way to send text messages. IPhone user base in 2011 was more than 2x larger than WhatsApp user base at the same time.

Yeah, I'll use WhatsApp or something like Facebook Messenger for the maybe handful of international folks I sometimes text with. But I don't care if Americans are texting green or blue--and that's 99% of the people I text with.

I communicate with Europeans in particular all the time. But those are via Gmail/Gchat or Twitter mostly.

Texting was free-ish (unlike in Europe, which is why WhatsApp & Co were so successful there but not in the US), but I think Multimedia messaging or some other extra features either cost money or didn't work outside of iMessage.

I don't want iMessage to be a _de facto_ standard. I want my work stuff to be mostly on my work channels. Very little work stuff gets onto my cell phone number which includes iMessage.

In France they have a law that the employer is not allowed to call you off work hours. I think it should also apply to instant messaging. They also have another good law which prohibits eating in the office, so they all have to take the lunch break off and eat at a restaurant or bistro or canteen. Which is great because food delivery also generates single use food container waste and also food waste.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your...

I mostly don't even want IMs on my personal phone though--and I don't want to carry two phones. I personally have no issue with doing some quick work off and on after hours--so long as you have no trouble with me taking care of some errands during the day. Seems a pretty good tradeoff.

When I went into an office, I would sometimes grab lunch at my desk if I just wanted some calories and wrap up my day as quickly as possible. Otherwise I'd eat with people in the cafeteria or go out (options for both of which varied a lot by job).

Agreed on the food container waste, but why would eating at the desk vs. in a restaurant cause more food waste? I'm just eating the same portion in a different place.

Also, when no one else is in the office, I sometimes like eating at my desk because I can eat by myself instead of having to deal with noisy people at the other tables.

Because something always comes up and the food goes cold and stale?

Plus the office reeks of food, ketchup on your keyboard, unhygenic. You can eat wherewer you want, just not in the office. You can eat in the park. The thing is, one also gets to disconnect from work, walk away from the desk and maintain a proper work life balance. Some French individuals also use the lunch break to exercise.

I don't live in France but we use the meeting room to eat, instead of eating at our desks. We properly vent it afterwards, of course.

Thats terrible, because it you can't bring your own food? What the hell do with people limit/weird diets do?

I work in France and nobody will complain if you eat at your desk, but it's not something people do usually. If you do it often people will comment that you should take your break. French people like to take the time to eat in some other place, even if done quickly.

Most employers have at least a dedicated room for eat your own food, with some basic equipment. In practice the law is more about what employers must provide in terms of amenities and time off to eat.

Okay, that is a lot different than not being allowed to eat in the office. All the two places I have worked had a separate eating area as well, though I often snack at my desk.

Yes you can, just not eat it in the office. They also bring their own food. I guess there are places where you can eat you own food confortably.

Is someone actually going to call the police if I'm eating a sandwich at my desk? And are they going to respond?

No you will just be ostracized. There is this line in Europe, the North-South divide. And they dont do "sandwich" for lunch it is full on dining with wine. Degenerates!

So you think that it’s good that the government tells you where you can eat?

Hopefully they'll just force everyone to federate with XMPP again. That was pretty great and now we have OMEMO so it's even E2EE.

Right, they may make Apple Messages interoperable with SMS…

Oh wait.

You're overstating the importance of Apple outside of the USA. No one I know uses Apple Messages.

aren't all the Big Tech companies you are thinking of, actually American Big Tech companies spreading out into other places? If I were not an American, I can definitely sympathize with the point of view that having American companies run vital communications for other populations.. is not OK. Open Standards are the concerted effort of thinking people to make something where the motivations can vary, but the tech is reliable. I think it is no accident that things like weather apps, chat, and trading photos have become ... not only that ..

In the 70s/80s/90s your software didn't change every day. Google started with xmpp with Talk, but it didn't evolve fast enough to add new features. In Talk days I had to dismiss notifications from every device, even though I'd read it on one. And file sharing, video calls, audio calls, group messages didn't work well.

The internet enabled software to update every day, that made standards way less relevant, sadly.

The HTML5 model of standards is probably best for the modern world

It's unbelievable how frothy the chat market is when there hasn't been a substantive innovation since the 80s.

I kept using Hangouts for so long because of one thing only: XMPP support. Even without federation it put Hangouts into a different tier of service.

Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol. What a sad state of affairs to be in 25 years after we had dozens of interoperable clients / protocols in routine use.

I used Miranda IM to chat with people on yim, msnm and gtalk all the time. It was amazing. Pidgin was good too. I miss that. I wish Facebook/Instagram chat, whatsapp and iMessage all supported XMPP.

> Now I guess there is not a single mainstream service that supports any interoperable standard protoocol.

Matrix

We migrated to Chat with our organization when they recommended it... It was rough for a while and it should've been in the oven for half a year longer, but now, it's an alright experience that ties in very well with the rest of workspace, especially considering that it's free of charge.

It’s still pretty rough as far as features go.

You can’t automatically set a channel to be marked as read, for example.

It's beta!

"Google Chat is now available in early preview for personal Google Accounts on Android and desktop. When you turn on Google Chat in Gmail settings, you can test the experience and features. You may not be able to switch back to classic Hangouts in Gmail settings."

-- https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7653601

Only giant monopoly profits can sustain decades-long incompetency like Google's messaging systems.

> It's beta!

Hah yeah, Google has only spent the last, what, 10 years developing video chat apps? It just blows my mind what a dunpster fire their text and video chat app conveyor belt has been.

How many years was GMail beta?

I just ignore any news relating to google communication services. Other than gmail, I just expect it to vanish in 18 months or less.

Google Inbox was amazing. I was a huge Gmail fan, I had all sorts of automatic rules, and labels, etc- then I tried Inbox. All of a sudden Gmail became an unmanageable mess compared to the simplicity of Inbox. But of course, Google killed inbox. It was the exact thing I needed to get out of Google. I use my own domain email now and have switched between a couple different providers. Of course I still have my Gmail email- but it just forwards to my main email now. Other then for work, I’ve fully de-googled my personal usage of Google. All thanks to them showing me the glory of Inbox and then killing it. Thanks Google!

Never heard of Inbox till now, but it looks like it was pretty cool.

I wonder if you could make a clone of it that used normal gmail(Or whatever other provider, if you degoogled) as a backend?

Which one was google talk?

For the last 5 years? Just a service. Google shut down all first party apps starting in 2012 and wrapping in 2017.

Amusingly, they started sunsetting it to support the move to Google+ Hangouts. Not only does Google+ no longer exist, not only does Google+ Hangouts no longer exist, the progeny Google Hangouts is also dead.

The first one. XMPP that worked with programs like Trillian and Adium.

It even worked cross-platform with Messages (iMessages?) on Max OSX.

Until Apple killed IMServicePlugin :(

I can't remember if this means my Polycom Google Voice ATA stops working or not. There was at least one third party Google Voice thing that needed Google Talk to work.

Most comments are critical about Google's way of doing things, but maybe this is a good moment for an eulogy. Is anyone using Google Talk right now or has good things to say about it? Was it a place where you happened to have meaningful conversation? (Not me, but sometimes I'm nostalgic about internet places that came and went...)

It was fine. I talked to some people in there, I plugged it into Pidgin as I did those days, it was nice that I could talk to other people using my own domain and later moved to other providers without contacts noticing.

Because it was open I could use a generic interface to it, which was good for me as it let me shove it into the same app as MSN, YIM and AIM, but not so good for Google as it didn't make it particularly sticky, which I gather is why they shelved it for hangouts (though they did leave it's undead corpse shamble on)

It would be great just to get an explanation of how people were even using it. Most users were kicked off Google Talk around 2013. Apparently third party apps were somehow allowed to continue using it.

They weren't kicked off. It was just known to people that only used the web app as Hangouts.

So weird, because they actually had the best one for some time. The Windows Google Talk client was amazing.

everything about it was great except the google part. That part makes it unusable.

whatsapp is a bit of a turd but i don't expect it to get janked half way the conversation.

Imagine if I did that to a production database. Instead of altering a table, just start over every schema change. Agile.

So, talk is now done. Great. What's next?

Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether.

I'm sure I missed one.

Just ignore any communication app coming from Google, it will be sooner or later killed.

> Let's see: Google speak. Google yak. Google chatter. Google gossip. Google watercooler. Google friends. Google chums. Google getogether.

You will use each one of them, and you will like it.

Phoneblocks

Fwiw, Google Chat and Spaces, while not on the same level as Slack are definitely filling the “good enough to stick with” niche at a small company I’m helping now.

If they actually commit to improving it, there’s real potential there.

How long before Google Chat is dead?

There was a joke making its rounds back in May...

> Overheard at Google IO: They’re making 6 new chat apps this year and decommissioning 7 of them.

I have successfully migrated almost all my contacts off Google Chat to either Whatsapp or Signal. The only holdout is my wife. Everyone else agreed that Google Chat is the worst of the bunch and their product hasn’t changed or improved in years.

I would love an explanation as to why this persists. Google has now become the place where products go to die and no one at Google seems to care. Nest is another company that hasn’t innovated or added significant new features in years. Same goes with Waze. Apple Maps is now the best navigation app because they have invested in innovation and for some reason Google won’t.

I mean, is anyone using it? Thought it was dead a long time ago.

I really had a Mandela effect here: I thought Google Talk had died a long, long time ago, having been replaced with Hangouts.

I had the exact same response. Its hard to keep track of which chat apps google has killed and which are still alive.

Yes and no.. Google Talk is the same as Hangouts, but the name of their XMPP service that connected to Hangouts.

rip xmpp support?

I guess. I've used the same xmpp integration for almost 15 years now. I remember thinking it was going to stop working at some point in the past, but it kept on chugging. I think maybe this time it will really die.

Too bad!

Wasn't xmpp support dropped years ago?

They've gradually broken it over the years, but it still runs in some limited form. It's barely interoperable with modern XMPP, but occasionally I hear of people still using it.

I didn't realize Google Talk existed anymore. Google has gone through at last a half dozen iterations of chat applications. I don't even know what the latest one is.

Loved Google Talk. Lightweight simple and does the job very well. Havent trusted Google after the moved off it.

Talk, chat, meet, hangouts, duo?

Are these the same - what will gsuite users use wtf

Google's history with messaging services has been a mess. I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over. I have very little interest in anything Google makes in this space as a result.

Google Talk, Chat, Meet, Duo, Messages, Hangouts.... I'm sure Im missing some. It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service.

I don't see how they will ever get anywhere if they are always starting over

I'm sure literally thousands of Google employees have gotten promoted on the strength of their work on building out yet another new chat platform. That's why they keep doing this; it has nothing to do with any sort of broad corporate strategy. It's individuals optimizing for their own success instead of for some vague notion of corporate success.

That explanation helps but doesn't explain why new chat apps get greenlit more often than new local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots.

Why is everyone sidestepping the most potent explanation - incompetent leadership.

>That explanation helps but doesn't explain why new chat apps get greenlit more often than new local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots.

Who said those other (local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots) aren't green lit just as often, and discarded just as fast when they get bored, from Google? E.g. social networks: Remember Orkut? Wave? Plus?

The last of those was 10 years ago. They seem to have learned from their experience there. It's only chat apps that seem a stubborn blind spot.

Bigger potential gains, the market is controlled by competitors (FB's Whatsapp in Europe, Apple's iMessage in the US), easiest to convince an exec to greenlight it.

Promotion Driven Development combined with https://xkcd.com/927/ and a heaping helping of decentralized decision making and probably charisma in order to convince someone that This Time It's Different™.

A never ending boatload of enabling cash from the golden goose of adtech monopoly certainly contributes to this as well?

Definitely. Basically the business results (ad revenue) is more or less decoupled, in the short and medium terms, from what I would guess 90% of engineers in Google do. So calculate digits of Pi, write books and blog posts, write chat apps, reinvent any wheel possible, rewrite code all the time. A lot of Google's software is actually becoming worse, search, chat, navigation/maps as the 10% that are doing valuable work are fighting entropy and the other 90%.

Pure speculation (other than the part about their software becoming worse) so would be interested in the insider's take here. That said it's a pattern I've seen in other places. It's crazy that with so many people of this caliber they're basically spinning their wheels in many areas. Some progress in a few areas, like cloud.

It's like 12 or 13. I've never seen a company fail this much at something.. They need to create a Razzie just to give it to google for their total incompetence at chat.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

That's a very comprehensive article, thank you, but I'm reminded of an earlier one from 2018 with the amusing title:

"Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...

It's only failing if you define that as "not dominating the planet's chat", which has a bunch of externalities. Several of their chat products were decent and companies were able to run all their internal meeting rooms off them.

What IS a failure is the thrash within that whole set of products. Adoption of new users via network effect is the activation energy and every flipflop halves their potential new market.

If they had simply stayed on, say, hangouts and kept improving it, they would keep all those users they lost.

I remember reading this article and thinking, "okay, this is already absurd, things can't get any worse" and then there's another chat engine Google once used to have. And another. And it keeps going on.

Also Allo and Buzz, plus chatting with other editors in Docs. SMS through Voice also integrated into Talk/Chat/Hangouts at various points.

If they had put an even remotely competent person (who cares about more than just getting promoted) in charge and they could have been a leading player the space by just keeping things clear enough to follow.

It is clearly the result of the internal structure of Google where no one in charge is seemingly that interested in producing cohesive products, there is apparently a kind of internal competitive economy which results in this and other nonsense.

Youtube Chat and Google Maps chat too

Why the heck would Google Maps have chat??

Waze has (or has had) beep beep as long as I can remember but nobody questions why Waze has chat...

So you can text while in a traffic jam and probably hit the car in front if you?

Ask for directions?

ba dum tssss.

You can send IMs via GPay. There was even a short lived "groups" option

Which payment system is that? IIRC GPay means different things in different countries.

GPay India.

Additionally I realised you can also send messages in Google Photos app using shared albums.

Maybe we ought to ask which Google app isn't a messaging app

One of my favorite quotes about this was “Easily the most doomed section of this entire article, even Google Stadia has a messaging service.”

>It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service.

It happens because of their internal promotion culture. You get a promotion much faster if you make something new than if you improve something old.

As a developer I’d much rather build something new than work on someone else’s code. There’s got to be much more than just a management problem here.

I’d much rather improve an old and popular, but flawed, existing product, and delight millions of users with an improved experience.

A good company has both kinds of developers, ideally more of the improve type than the build new type.

Google’s management failure is that the optimize for the “build new” engineer and actually punish the “improve” engineer by stalling their career.

The occasional revolution is great and necessary, but evolution is extremely underrated.

Apple tends to do this well. Messages feels like one continuous evolution from the basic SMS app on the first iPhone. When iChat moved to Messages a couple features were lost, but the important ones are back now. It was a new name, but it felt more like a unification between iOS and macOS vs just thinking a new app would help them get more users.

If someone went from a v1 iPhone to an iPhone 13, the new one would have dramatically more features and capabilities, yet it will still feel familiar. There is a lot of value in that. Engineers can "build new" within an existing framework if the foundation is solid.

When the "build new" dev make something new it's up to management to decide if it should be a feature of the existing service or if it's foundational enough to require a whole new app. That choice to build new should not be taken lightly, as migrating millions of users is not a trivial task and they will lose people along the way.

Don’t they have a rule that you can’t create something that competes with another Google product? How do any of these get created in the first place?

There is no such rule. "Make a better thing thats so good that the users all choose to use the new thing over the old thing" is the aim...

That was probably a fine idea when they were getting started and just throwing ideas against the wall when starting at 0, but they are a big establish company with big established products. They can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater every time and expect users to actually be on board.

Google Wave was the perfect example of that. Wave would have been amazing if it was integrated into Gmail. Like Apple did with iMessage, if a Gmail user emailed another Gmail user (or group of users) it would turn into a Wave and get a bunch of extra features. This would have provided value, instantly given it millions of users, and encouraged current users to get their friends and co-workers on Gmail to use Waves. Instead, they made it it's own invite-only service (trying to recreate the Gmail magic) and it was a failure due to lack of users.

This is a horrible strategy and they are going to continue shooting themselves in the foot if they don't pivot.

Also, never consider how you will migrate users of the old thing if you are ever actually successful.

> are always starting over

I wouldn’t mind it if they kept features or something. Some coherent process, features, etc.

But it is a half baked deal every time with old / obvious features missing.

They operate like a mini no name start up and as far as I’m concerned I don’t think of it that way / if it has the name Google I expect some level of polish…maybe respect the users who get dragged from app to app…

It's like what happened with Google Pay (I think it was that) where they rewrote it from scratch with fewer features, it was so bizarre.

google play music to yt music. they rewrote from scratch with less features and more bugs

HN tends to read deprecation notices (in this case, for a 17 year old frontend) and immediately bring up every marketing name for anything and everything involving text communication Google has ever made.

For the record:

- v1 - "Gchat" - simple chat added to Gmail

- v2 - "Google Talk" - 2005 - general chat service created out of "Gchat" enabling people to use it outside Gmail

- v3 - "Google Hangouts" - 2013 - integrate video chat from G+ into Talk

- v4 - "Google Meet/Chat" - 2017 - split Hangouts into video (Meet) and messaging (Chat)

If it is all different frontends to the same backend, they very much failed at marketing. For an advertising company, creating this much chaos in their branding and communication is very confusing and somewhat laughable.

> For an advertising company

Google is not an advertising company, but a provider of space for advertising.

Distinction without a difference

Its not like they assemble billboards

Idk that really feels like what adsense and such are.

Do people that make billboards create complex algorythms to evaluate their efficiency and charge you per each glance the billboard get?

I'm sure a billboard in Times Square is much more expensive than one in rural Montana. They don't need a complex algorithm, but they are going to charge by the impressions/demand in that sense.

More than 80% of Alphabet's revenue comes from their ad business[0]. It used to be up around 97%[1].

Yes, they have a bunch of complex algorithms and way to track, but it's all in the name of selling those ads. If they can target the ads, they can charge more. If they can give exact metrics on the impact of the ads, they can charge more. They bought YouTube to gather data and sell ads. They released Android to gather data to sell ads. They released Chrome to gather data and sell ads. They bought Nest and released routers to gather data and sell ads. Everything they do is being done to further prop up their ad business.

Google is the modern billboard company. Without the ad business they wouldn't exist, at least not to the extent they do today. How they sell ads is irrelevant, they are still an advertising company first.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/oct/25/advertising-go...

No one should need to be a Google historian to know where to go to send a message.

You don't. This is a 'not even wrong' argument in reality, though a definite problem theoretically.

In that timeline I laid out, wherever your message was, even going back to 2005 unnamed Gmail feature, it's still there.

Marketing names are what the users use. Users don’t say « let’s get in touch via Google Chat Platform Protocol v4".

They use the marketing name without knowing what is behind. And to be fair, as of today, I’m not even sure non tech people even know how the current mainstream Google chat is named. The only time I used Google chat (maybe it was hangouts) was to reach my coworkers when slack was down.

What's Google Duo?

Allo and Due are two entirely seperate apps that undermines the point the author is trying to make.

Not to mention that Meet existed before it was called Meet, and was confusingly also called Hangouts at that point but had no interop with consumer Hangouts.

Don't forget a out Google Wave!

Or Google Buzz!

Was it Google Messages the one that came up as a pop-up in gmail and let you very easily do videoconferencing? I can't remember.

Yeah I'm just one person, but their confusing and chaotic approach to messaging apps and the Inbox vs GMail thing a few years ago were the two things what turned me from respecting Google and interested in their new apps into believing the don't have any idea or care what they are doing and better off not trying out or depending on their offerings.

(Thank goodness they haven't done same to maps and docs).

That’s a really good way to describe it. I no longer respect Google. Their core search engine is in decline, their cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors, they began weaponising open source as a recruitment pipeline, and they can deliver a product with any sort of expectation that it will last more than 12 months anymore…

I have lost respect for them. I have gone from an enthusiastic Search and chrome and gmail user… I got into the invite only beta in the first six months! … to basically only caring when Google do things that affect the non-stuff I actually care about.

> cloud is innovative but useless and has the most confusing UI of the three major cloud vendors

I beg to disagree: I find AWS's UI the most confusing--I am showered with services I don't use & don't know what they do (Beanstalk? I have no idea what that is). I find that if I stick with VPC and EC2 I'm safe, but even then they throw some curve balls at you: for example, VPC is all about networking & IP addresses unless you're talking about Elastic IPs, in which case you need to go to EC2.

Azure's interface is okay, but the sliding menus-thing throws me off.

Google's is the cleanest UI IMHO. Not too many services, intelligently grouped.

Although I've used AWS the longest & am used to its idiosyncrasies, I'm under no illusion that its UI well laid out.

When are we going to get the google version of WOOF to unify all of these disparate services?

Underrated post...assuming you mean wuphf lol

They also acquihired Meebo.

A normal company would have had basically one product all these years and not renamed it just due to internal engineering efforts.

I also imagine chat apps are great for promotion driven development. Not that hard to make from scratch relative to something like search or maps. I’m surprised Gmail isn’t constantly cannibalized, although still it has been a small amount. Some execs must be protecting dilution of that important brand.

They did do Inbox which tried to cannabalize Gmail but it ended with it merging some features back in to Gmail instead.

I really miss inbox

The only thing more upsetting to me than having Inbox foisted on me was having it torn away from me afterwards. I was resistant to more change for the sake of change from Google, then Inbox won me over with its excellent UI. It became a combination of to-do list, email, and calendar that felt like an extension of my brain. The tiny concessions to its good UX that were pulled into Gmail were cold comfort. The equivalent functionality in GCalendar is way more clunky.

But Inbox was never foisted on anybody, the standard Gmail interface has always been available.

I guess I'm misremembering again.

They did shut it down before it took off though. And made a half hearted attempt to merge the features.

That's a better outcome than the mediocre YouTube music killing Play Music.

Especially for those of us who had uploaded all our songs from CDs by miscellaneous local bands that went extinct long before every band put its songs on YouTube.

  A normal company would have had (...)

Alphabet (or Google) is not a normal company. According to Alphabet's[0] website:

  As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

[0] - https://abc.xyz

Alphabet couldn't be a more appropriate name for such an "abnormal" company https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

Indeed. And I find it interesting how this

  The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. (...)

ties up nicely with Google's FLoC[0]:

  FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based selection of ads and other content.

  As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else.

And the name makes the whole thing even funnier. Pretty interesting coincidence. ;-)

[0] - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/floc/

Google has had so many variants of this that I don’t even know what they’re shutting down by just reading the headline.

Fun reading: An exhaustive(?) history of Google's communication tools. There are like five different products with "Hangout" branding.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

If Google hadn’t been so obsessed with making messaging special (one way or another) they might have managed to make it good.

Let me help you, if you type `/hangout` command in Slack, it opens google meet...

And if you just type / and find that option in the list it's listed as a "Google+ Hangout"!

GChat, Talk, Duo, Meet, Hangouts... what did I miss?

Messages, Voice, Allo (rip)

even Google docs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...

Allo

Orkut.

Wave

Also YouTube messaging

I feel like my brain is now trained to skip over any Google chat-oriented product names or any information whatsoever about them simply because of the continuous churn.

Instead I'm trained to just look for something that looks like a chat window and use that. I literally have no idea which one I actually use, nor whether this announcement affects me.

I would love to know if inside Google there is any long term analysis of this. Is it just a series of teams getting accolades each year/quarter for Yet Another Chat Service? Or is someone taking the long view and evlauating just how much market confusion Google have spawned with this ridiculous never-ending saga?

You are not alone in feeling this way. Hangouts was awesome and for a while my friend group tried to keep up with whatever googles newly pitched chat app was. We all just use WhatsApp now.

At this time it is a running gag that Google creates a messenger every one or two years.

They have so much leverage with google accounts, gmail and android … pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world.

But they achieved to even cripple Google Meets, a product that works. Unbelievable.

Except WhatsApp has already taken over the world.

There seems to be this perception that Google can defeat any competitor if they chose to, and that benefit of the doubt is never given to the competition. They can't, and fail almost every time time. Android is one exception (though Apple remains the more impressive company than Google, as far as 10Ks are concerned), and GCP is certainly successful despite having the Bronze medal in the cloud space, but it reeks of a "Lebron James could be the best boxer in the world or best NFL QB if he just trained for 3 months" kind of vibe.

Is the problem perhaps that a standalone product like WhatsApp or Telegram offers some degree of privacy?

I'm not sure if Google Talk/Hangouts/whatever ever offered privacy, I know Telegram's privacy model has flaws, and I'm not clear on WhatsApp's quality of security. At any rate, I do know people expect both WhatsApp and Telegram to be relatively private, which likely counts for something. On the other hand, I find people assume Google products are by default not private.

I'm not sure how decision making occurs, but I have a hard time envisioning a GoogleGram application getting adopted easily because it would be perceived as a commercial effort in an otherwise less commercial/more private space.

I could be totally wrong here, and I'm mostly curious what others think.

Google Hangouts … I even forgot that that existed.

I think most consumers use the product the works for them and is free. Privacy is an aspect, but most, not all, people don’t care that much.

A working product beats a half working product that preserves privacy. If it works and preserves privacy … u have a winner.

Current wisdom is that company exists to make money and everything is optimized for that. What if workers are fully onboard and working hard for next promotion? For products that are not money making machines like the ad biz, let them wither and start a new every couple years?

> pushing a WhatsApp / Telegram clone that works would take over the world.

True. It is frankly amazing how Google can't compete in that area

They lack the vision. They lack the top-down mandate. They lack the will to centralize and push the effort.

(see how most projects were experiments/things that "stuck"). I think one of the few times where Google successfully managed a global project to completion was Android? (and yet it was acquired)

Failing to avoid antitrust issues if they succeed and become the dominant hub for online?

I don't think anyone antitrust is relevant at all in this discussion. Nobody would think that Google Talk/Chat/Whatever is remotely close to being scrutinized by government agencies.

They „sponsor“ with x00 millions to exist. A competitor is great, because it avoids antitrusts like Microsoft had with IE.

Google honestly has the worst products of any large tech. Confusing and irritating. The only bright spark they had was the single search box on the homepage. And that was a stroke of luck. I am sure if they tried anything else, they would have messed it up.

Right. But when it comes to confusing and irritating products, Microsoft is also very good.

No one can match Microsoft for terrible naming and mind-bogglingly bad name changes.

The epitome is the chat platform: starting out as the very generic Office Communications Server, then switching to the surprisingly clever Lync (short and unique, fantastically searchable), but then taking a turn for the literally blocked by corporate web proxies and unsearchable Skype for Business (the docs about switching to the new version were on hard-blocked skype.com), with confusing Skype for Business Online (same client, utterly different back end), and now to even less searchable Teams.

I guess having two of their foundational products be extremely common English utterances just set them up for this lack of reflection.

ribbon toolbar, clippy, the list goes on

The annoying thing is that they put a search box on my phone's home screen, which I can't hide, even if I disable it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com