Google says iMessage is too powerful

Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by reincarnate0x14 on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @04:30PM (#29898242)

It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016.

Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.

It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by jareklupinski on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @08:35PM (#29901195)

We need a new Pidgin https://www.pidgin.im/ :(

There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.

It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by lelandfe on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @09:38PM (#29901622)

I'd forgotten about that era of my life! I used Adium on OS X and had customized so much about it, down to the individual sounds played when certain friends (and crushes) came online. And I was able to essentially ignore what platform I was using to talk on: AIM friends and GChat friends appeared side-by-side. What a dream.

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by Melatonic on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @10:37PM (#29901971)

Trillian here for me! That shit was AWESOME. So much customization too of the UI.

I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by SllX on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @10:37PM (#29901977)

Loved Adium.

Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.

Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by mr_toad on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @07:27PM (#29900555)

For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.

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Re:Google says iMessage is too powerful by genewitch on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @06:19PM (#29899876)

For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.

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