Google Hangouts/GTalk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts.
As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well).
Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either.
When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved.
Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform.
[edit: spelling]
Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?
I wonder if the bug is related to these changes.
(My brain short-circuited there for a moment when trying to form a reply to a comment that was both extremely sarcastic and ludicrously wrong. Hopefully the above meets all our expectations.)
It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant
It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc.
If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists.
Edited: to use more polite tone.
The vast majority of communication happens on products that: 1. Don't even have a desktop component 2. Have no "status" indication (oh noes!!!) 3. Are completely closed ecosystems
And yet you never see posts about how WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, etc are horrible because of the above reasons.
Communication in general, business communication still is very much dominated by desktop software (e.g. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-lync-video-confe...)
If you're still thinking of gchat as a desktop AOL Instant Messenger replacement then I can see that products that seem to operate that way are disappearing. The way people are using chat products is changing drastically due to mobile. I would say AOL-style chat isn't going away because Google killed the competition -- rather I think demand for those style systems is just dwindling in favor of multi-platform, multi-modality, multi-party chat clients (picture/text/video, desktop/tablet/mobile).
I agree that classic desktop IM apps have changed anyway, except in the enterprise world (where MS and IBM still ship horrible, horrible stuff).
I've had a conversation on my phone, only to go home and flip on my computer and see those messages finally get sent a good 90 minutes later.
I use it every day and don't think i get anything like this issue (for balance)
They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.
Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.
So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
This is where you turn it off until you fix it. This isn't a service disruption, this is a service malfunction with far more serious potential consequences than delayed emails, or inability to download an app, or duplicate credit card charges, and you can't fix those consequences after the fact, not even by applying vast amounts of money.
Edit: A bit of reading says that this probably is unrelated...
Haven't talked to him in ages, we had a good chat and we're going to meet for a drink at the weekend (sans probe). Cheers Google!
Pretty horrible bug.
A Norwegian example/proof: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83758451/Screenshot_2013...
Releasing is hard to scale up like google have to. How many apps are they releasing to daily...!
It's not technical building blocks (they can all be automated), not even busy work, just complex intertwined dependencies from completely different, often non-electronic, domains.
Hypothetical release co-ordinator speaking: "Did app A release this morning into EMEA prod? Ok that means app B can go but only once the security review team drop their veto. Has release candidate 2 been promoted to the canary environment yet? Remember B's new deployment process is in scope this release, and do not release to the 5 servers in the BCP datacentre today..."
Could you imagine managing the constant evolution of a rules engine to replace a good quality release co-ordinator? I don't think i'd be able to sleep!
As far as i can see, continous deployment doesn't have the general applicability that continuous delivery enjoys.
Was it his/her race that fucked it up? Would it have been better if Google hired only the finest corn-fed Mid Western white American?
In general, we deserve to have more decentralised services that are built on the principle of 'privacy by design', rather than 'trust by design'. Maybe, screw-ups like this can help spur more efforts in that regard.
How much are such things worth for paying customers?
If you're making a general point about why people would pay for such things then privacy/security is just one more axis on which to consider purchasing decisions. It's up to the individual/organisation to decide what they really care about when they're choosing between different options. My concern is that there aren't really enough options that do consider the privacy/security aspect as well as the usability, so I see a gap there. I'd be glad to hear others' opinions on this though.
[1] I was already a paying user of MobileMe purely because I wanted auto-syncing of contacts and calendar so that price-point ($99 per year) is clearly one I'm willing to pay for something that works. I paid it grudgingly at first but I did pay (and renew). Whether that's actually a sustainable price-point for the provider is a different question.
I respectfully (and strongly) disagree. You're essentially saying that free customers can be completely screwed over and have basically no rights at all (and you seem to be implying that this ok). Legally speaking, maybe Google has absolutely no obligation to say anything (even to it's paying customers), but this isn't about meeting the minimum legal requirements.
On a related note, how many people really have the ability to comprehend the ToS they click on? The reading level of many of those is surprisingly high given the demographics that use the services, so the concept of 'informed consent' is already quite strained imho. Therefore, people fall back on trust and it's probably in the providers interest that they do this (as they can make a ToS that's great for their own needs, while legally providing very little to the user).
As a general rule, this is not true according to the law. If I feed someone a free meal, and they get food poisoning because I didn't maintain proper hygiene in my kitchen, I am at fault.
What do you mean by this? And how would this prevent a similar bug in the future?
In a decentralized system like BitMesasge the likelihood of a misroute is so low that it would take a trillion trillion universes a trillion trillion lifetimes before the chance of it happening once was even remotely likely, given every atom in each universe were sending a message to an other atom each pico-second.
It's just not going to happen.
http://www.slashgear.com/google-blames-rogue-contractors-for...
Hangouts has been a debacle. I'm furious that the upgrade was shoved down our throats (on Android) for a next-gen tool that was as feature incomplete as the first EA Sports' Madden game on a new gaming system.
Be careful! I guess the best course of action is not to use gmail chat until google announces they have fixed the issue.
You can't tell me you have confidence that this randomly won't happen again in the future? It's shattered mine.
Already you've cut yourself off from flying, riding on trains and driving. Nobody can guarantee that deadly accidents will never happen, and indeed they do happen.
Presumably you only eat food your grow yourself. There are regular instances of contamination in the industrial food sector. Not that any guarantees can really be made, but at least contamination will be mostly your own fault.
See where I'm going with this?
There are alternatives and one could choose a statistically safer one. There is obviously no guarantee. However, gtalk now has the highest likelihood of sending your messages to random people. That's a reason to avoid it.
1: Except, of course, IRC which is a protocol, not a service, and it was never designed to be private, but that's pedantry.
What I meant though is that the fact that whatever kind of shenanigans they're doing internally has a failure condition that can misroute messages is a bit scary.
It happens on regular accounts, not just Business, I've seen it this morning when I got messages intended for somebody else.
I would refrain to send any sensitive information over Google Talk right now.
Why only "right now"? Why ever send sensitive information over a 3rd party's server. While I believe that Google will find and fix the problem, they probably make little to no claims about the level of security they offer. So using them at all should be a calculated risk.
What you shouldn't do is transmitting sensitive information without controlling the end-to-end encryption chain. If you do that, you can involve as many third party servers as is convenient.
Actually, this is what I meant and I should have been clearer. Thanks for pointing it out.
EDIT - I don't use gtalk for sending confidential info, so this doesn't affect me, but this could also happen with Gmail that I trust lot of data with (bank, school, government etc)..
That said, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
While I agree with that statement in general, I couldn't quite make out what you meant by it in this context.
Are you saying "good" = "most of the times your Google messages will go to the intended recipients" and "perfect" = "all of the times your messages will go to the intended recipients"?
Nobody is talking about that this is some acceptable status quo. It's a bug and it will be fixed. If past performance is considered, it will be fixed fast.
You are reducing what happened today to a mere "bug", which is the way Google (or developers) would look at it. Instead, approach it from the user's POV. Having your financial, personal, professional, secret or illegal (yes, I'm sure there will be that too) communications sent to multiple random people is more than just a bug.
I agree GTalk is "really, really good" like you say, but then what happened today also should "never, ever happen".
- Multiple sign-ins cause issues all the time (Gtalk in GMail, GTalk on the phone/tablet is already enough to cause it to go nuts and send messages here or there, seemingly random). It _could_ allow me to specify what I prefer (XMPP should support that), but it doesn't.
- Loses messages all the time (every ~10th message doesn't arrive. My wife and me stopped using it for anything of value because of this)
- Hangout. The "We don't like XMPP anymore, want to force you to use G+ and .. have the most ugly show-me-some-comic-bubbles interface to make the transition extra smooth" app
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the issue is hangout, not GTalk-the-original-xmpp-thing.
Yep, that is what they say. You know what else they say ?
"The enemy of good is good enough"
and also
"A witty saying proves nothing".
Edit:
As the people below have pointed out Voice isn't available to me - Talk is.
I mean, I watch what I say online anyway, but I sure wasn't expecting Google to force me to open a dialogue with an ex.
So from now on, just write things you can assume in front of the whole world. Don't write shit about people you don't like. Keep that for face-to-face talk with your friends. Things written last so much longer than things said.
They "read" your mails, know what you search for and who your friends are. It would seem strange for them to go out of their way to provide truly OTR gtalk. And I'm totally fine with that, there are plenty of alternatives if I ever need encrypted chat.
Good going Google.