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Talko

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70 pointsfrankus50 comments

Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronaut rants do, perhaps unfairly in this case, immediately spring to my mind. Especially as Joel calls out Ray Ozzie by-name ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

Communications applications have to be extremely hard to pull off successfully, and God bless Ozzie for trying again.

I'm tempted to spout off on how one would do this thing "right", but I think that would make me the astronaut pot calling the architect kettle black.

But then again, this appears in the article you linked:

“Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.”

Thanks for pointing that out! And when this was written, Dropbox had been in operations for 11 months...

Joel assumes the reason why synchronization apps didn't succeed was because there was no market, whereas the success of Dropbox proved the market was there alright, it just waited for the right app at the right time.

I've needed file synchronization for my whole professional life, which started in 1991. At first there was no Internet; then there was Internet but you couldn't connect to it at work (imagine that!) and the rate at home was so slow it wouldn't have made any sense to try to exchange files over the network (even when most Excel files weighted 20k).

I used floppies, and Zip discs (remember those?) and removable hard drives, with bizarre synchronization and copying applications that never worked properly and with which you could very easily erase your own files if used in the wrong way.

The day I found Dropbox was like the Second Coming. It was the day I stopped worrying.

I very much disagree with Joel about architecture astronauts; contrary to what we hear sometimes, being early is not the same as being wrong.

> The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things

I would trade a million Twitters for one Dropbox, and I bet I'm not alone. Dropbox we need; Twitter? not so much.

It's not. Collaborative editing is.

People were using file syncing for asynchronous collaborative editing. File syncing is not such a big deal now that we have synchronous collaborative editors.

Dropbox?

I'd say Google Drive, because the web app is so complete and nice that for simple purposes, you wouldn't mind not installing the desktop client, especially since you edit the files on the web anyway. So off-site storage + collaborative editing = Google Drive. Dropbox, on the other hand, is mostly a file syncing service; they may have some photo features on their web app, but that's it outside of file syncing.

Can't disagree with GDrive being awesome. However, I was responding to the parent's suggestion that the parent's parent's quote was negated by e.g. GDrive.

With less double negatives: File syncing has actually turned out to be a pretty big thing, it just took (and this might be a bad list, but off the top of my head) 1. mobile adoption, 2. higher avg bandwidth and 3. someone getting it right. GDrive/Evernote/… does not negate that there is a demand for Dropbox.

I'm not a mod, but I believe downvotes should be used for comments which are not constructive or appropriate, rather than comments one disagrees with.

Microsoft OneNote

I've no problem being called an astronaut, even if I'm not working on this problem. Sync sucks. With all these services like Dropbox, OneDrive and so on I still have to manage sync myself. I still don't trust the security (this is huge). I still can't resume a song or movie on my phone where I left off on my PC. My bookmarks don't sync between Firefox and IE.

If I had the resources this is something I'd try to fix. It's 2014 for crying out loud. Live Mesh got me excited at the time, but it just never went as far as it needed to.

Well, I think Architecture Astronauts are generally a huge nuisance because they can sell work so well. Yet they so often simultaneously produce these unworkable, purely conjectural designs that so often do not connect with real users and their needs/wants. And how many times have I heard "all the knowledge about the system is locked up in his head"? Tough to keep the bile down sometimes.

Heck, I'm up and working at 4am today because of an AA and his stupid "elegant" data design that is "set in stone" that requires me to provide reams of documentation. I have to make up for the fact that my data is wholly incomprehensible without all kinds of independent documentation. This is all work the AA should have done himself, but instead all he shares are these idyllic, sophomoric examples that NEVER appear in the real world.

It's rich that the system is thought to be "elegant" because one major aspect is simple (there are only something like 8 fundamental data types in the file format to describe the whole system). Elegant? No, perhaps "convoluted" describes it better, maybe "rambling". Data files tend to be veeeery tall and veeeery skinny. Sigh.

So I'm working up to a huge real-world demo and I'm looking forward to canvasing the team in order to create a crisis. "Looking at this realistic example and seeing how much work it took me to get here, what are your impressions of the file format?"

Continuity on iOS 8 / Yosemite will solve some of those issues. But that's if you're in the ecosystem.

Play a movie on your laptop, resume on your device when you leave (given there is an app for it)

Talkomatic was the world's first multi-user chat application. It was hosted on the PLATO system where Ray Ozzie once worked. There is a online version created by the original authors at:

http://talko.cc/

I was curious about the timeline of chat applications and googled it. EMISARI pre-dated Talkomatic by a couple years: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm

Awesome, a smartphone app that allows me to communicate with people via voice. This might be exactly the killer app that mobile phones have been waiting for.

Killer feature request: a dual-streaming mode where I can talk and hear a friend talk at the same time.

The future is gonna be AWESOME.

Whoa whoa whoa. FULL duplex?!

That's what I'm imagining. I know the engineers figured out a way to get it to work walky-talky style where you can either speak or listen (but not both) two-way -- let's call that partial duplex -- but I think the new wave of innovating social mobile apps could really utilize the flat network design paradigm in this new way, creating a whole new way to communicate with friends that also opens doors for enterprise usage. I think this could really make the world a better place.

They should totally build it in Clojure and Erlang!

The idea you'd know we're building it, and how? Absurd! Let's follow the example of the founder in question -- STEALTH it.

Come on, that's how to have SUPER ADVANCED technology.

"The Voxer application, for example, is capable of supporting full-duplex communication, allowing two (or more) participants of a conversation to engage in near real-time communication, similar to a synchronous telephone call. Participants are therefore required to select the PTT feature for the entire duration of the full-duplex exchange, which may be inconvenient after a certain period of time."

http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982

WhatsApp and Line are multi-billion dollar companies that replaced a simple thing phones could already do. Laughing and making sarcastic jokes at something that makes voice mail better and easier with a nice UI by a proven competent individual is probably the wrong response to make, especially when the UI and features look pretty gangbuster. A little bit of polish and better ease of use can make whole lot of people happy and also lots of money.

WhatsApp is highly price-competitive with the native offerings, particularly in the markets where it is most popular. It also benefits from wide cross platform and cross network availability.

While the UI for Talko might be slick, there are already very similar and competitive offerings to Talko that operate on multiple platforms (e.g. Voxer) that have failed to take any market share the way Talko apparently hopes to.

If they're going to be successful, it will boil down to marketing more than anything.

I agree, powerful marketing will make the difference -- seeing as Voxer is essentially the same product.

I had the same thought when I first saw Uber. "I have the number for XYZ taxi/limo service programmed into my phone. What's so special here?". To the vast majority of people, a better interface for doing something they already do is itself a killer app. Ask a teenager how often they email their friends. They'll laugh at you. Why? Because Snapchat and Instagram are better interfaces for communicating the things they want than traditional email.

Talko is arguably a better interface than most professionals use for many aspects of communications, so they have at least a reasonable chance of success.

Can we add some way to send short text messages too?

Yeah, Ok, if we must.

I'll chuck it in as an appendix to the spec. Not that anyone will ever use it! I'll have to limit it to 160 characters though because I've only got 140 bytes to play with.

It's not like you can write anything meaningful with 160 chars anyway! When the hardware gets better we'll write a proper text messaging implementation. Lol!

Hardy har har

Voice isn't the clearest or the fastest way to communicate.

I'd suggest the opposite - that's it's slow, unclear and probably the worst form of digital communication. There's no good log, it's not silent, you can't link to other information (or copy it) and it requires one person to stop talking before another can start.

This all aside, iOS 8 now let's you send voice messages in the default messages app - seems like this company has no market?

Voice is much more clear because it conveys nuance, such as sarcasm, which text cannot. I bet speaking is much faster than typing for most people, although reading is faster than listening. Voice (sound) is analog, not digital!

Converting voice to text solves a lot of these problems, but this app doesn't do that.

I'd argue that nuance is harder to determine through voice on a phone when you can't read body language and have a harder time hearing them. It's pretty easy through text when you know the person or use an emoticon. Videochat is definitely better than text for that reason though still don't have a log or ability to search/copy.

By digital I meant communicating with some sort of digital device and not face to face or through a letter.

I came to say this, but also wanted to add that searching a voice communication is quite problematic compared to a written conversation. For evidence of how unclear it is, just look at the amount of times journalists use brackets to clean up quotations because people tend to speak in broken fragments.

There's also no good search engine for audio messages. This may be a big deal for businesses, when compared with email.

I found this landing page extremely diluted from a information point of view.

From the first block:

Amazing things can happen when we talk with each other. Thoughts are shared, ideas formed and problems solved. Talko is the best way to use your voice to get things done.

The first sentence doesn't bring me any information, it's just a bland statement. The second is an expansion of the first. The third says this Talko thing is a way to do things with your voice.

I felt like loo¥sing my time reading nonsense, when I could be learning about a new app and see demos of cool features.

I remember thinking it was pretty revolutionary when I got a demo back in early 2013 (had an interview there, but got a too-good-to-refuse offer elsewhere).

Granted, that was before FaceTime audio and the audio features of iMessage, but at the time I was basically ready to bury everything on my iPhone's dock and replace it with this as soon as it launched.

It has a ton of really slick touches that I think make it a really compelling app, well beyond the sum of it's core features.

I'm not too thrilled with the idea of a phone that automatically records and archives my voice conversations. When I call someone, I prefer to not have the stress of being careful of every word I say, lest someone try to make something of every inane comment I make, and I make a lot of them.

It seems like a cheap shot, but it has to be said: I'm having trouble seeing what this provides that iMessage doesn't provide already:

- Text, check.

- Pictures and videos, check.

- Group messaging, check.

- Voice messaging, check.

It sounds like they recreated the iMessage core features, other than the ability to fall back to SMS for text. I wonder about privacy protection. Maybe there are some other bells and whistles on top?

> We're working on our Android and web apps.

iMessage doesn't have that.

Ray Ozzie's launch blog is also great: https://medium.com/talko-team-talk-share-do/welcome-to-talko...?

I haven't used Talko, but it sounds like a converged communication app, kind of Wave-ish, combining real-time (talk, chat) asynchronous (like email) and an archive organized by conversation.

Plus convenient and easy?

Is that right?

My opinion of this application is as follows, and nothing on the page really convinces me that my perception of the application is wrong so I have very little impetus to install it and find out how right or wrong I am.

First impression is it's a nice, professional and polished application but it's an application that makes noise. Which means (on my iPhone):

* When I'm listening to music with my headphones on and some communication comes in from this app, it's going to be via voice and my music will fade out.

* When I open the app it's going to initialise the sound device even though it doesn't need to make sound just yet and my music will fade out just by opening the app. (Not guaranteed: a lot of apps do this, this one could too.)

* When this app starts playing instead of my music it's going to confuse my car's entertainment system and my music won't start again. (This problem is specific to my car.)

Basically this app is going to be annoying in ways that iMessage and email are not.

This looks like a reinvention of, and blurring of the lines between, voicemail and the phone call.

And actually, I like the idea.

Sometimes I find email and SMS a chore, but would love to leave my partner a 5 second "Hey I'm picking up milk, do you need anything else?" message that was auto-transcribed, and if I were on the tube (unavailable) she could leave a message for me "Yeah, some of those star-shaped veg, you know the ones next to the beans down the end of the second aisle".

She'd never have typed that into an SMS, and I probably would've just winged trying to think if there was anything she needed.

Metropolis transportation and living makes communication broken and fractured. Real-time mobile communication works only when both people are online... so a near real-time thing that overcomes the flaws of mobile coverage in cityscapes and their transport (cycling, underground metro systems, etc) and still retain a personal touch would be great.

I love it "Available for iPhone. More platforms coming."

I really think he hit the nail on the head with his memo when leaving MSFT...

The tech and UX side of this app are both quite interesting, but the real story will be in their user acquisition. Getting people, particularly people under 35, to use a new communications app is really hard because they have to persuade people in their networks to use it too, otherwise it offers no value. Skype did it by being really easy video conferencing, WhatsApp did it by being a free alternative to SMS, Snapchat did it by automatically deleting sexts. On the face of it, Talko offers nothing that people don't already have, so it'll be interesting to see how and where they push it.

Haven't yet played with this, but every time there is talk of a new messenger, no one ever mentions WeChat, I guess it's just not that popular out of mainland China, but it blows whatsapp out of the water. If even for the very simple fact that I don't have to hit "Send" I just hit "Enter/Done" on the keyboard, more phone-based messaging apps should do this imo

I don't have an iPhone so I can't install it but it could be a case of bad communication. At least the product page doesn't explain what problem it is trying to solve or what the difference is between this an hangout or whatsapp. So it just looks like just another app. And maybe it is

There may be many apps, solving different parts of this problem, but putting all these different parts under one roof can sometimes make a difference. That's what they are doing.

>The software visionary who created Lotus Notes

Stopped reading after this.

Lotus Notes was revolutionary and visionary when it came out, in 1989.

That it failed to really adapt to a changing technological landscape and failed to meet user expectations is more an indictment of the management at Lotus/IBM than an indictment of the initial creator.

Didn't the Web overtake Lotus Notes for many purposes? No server to pay for, open to anyone, etc...

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