A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps (2021)

It was great when Google Talk would federate with any compatible chat service over XMPP. Nowadays, Google's different services don't even have compatible chat systems within themselves.

Honsestly reading this, it sounds like Google Talk was a wildly successful system that morphed into a backend for all kinds of weird things. And now we all use Hangouts/Meets which seems to be a pretty successful part of the GSuite system.

Google built a decent consumer chat that turned into an extension of Gmail. Hangouts was the rewrite that came in and took over Gmail chat and calls. Gmail, Docs, Meet eventually all became a successful enterprise product in the GSuite.

The reality is Google's peak messaging days were 2016-2019. When you could send/receive text messages from your Gmail inbox alongside Google's native chat platform. Also, all of your chats were backed up and searchable by Gmail (which was actually good at the time).

Having RCS is nice, but I always said the deep integration of SMS into gmails platform was a big competitive advantage and was something that kept me firmly in the ecosystem for years.

Sent from my iPhone

Discussion at the time (144 points, 80 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727

"Slack (eight years old)"... really?

I mean I could be wrong but I was under the impression Slack was just IRC with a fancy web interface. And IRC goes back to 1988 is wikipedia is to be believed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC

If I'm right that means Slack is much older, except for the fancy UI parts, which are no great improvement over say the nice colors of BitchX with some bots that record the channel history.

And you can't take over Slack channels by riding a server split. That would be super-cool though.