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).

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.

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.

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

They really should have both.

I can't lie, its a heavy moat.

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

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.

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?

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

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)

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 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.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.

Hell how to get WhatsApp profitable seems to befuddle Facebook.

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...

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?

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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

They choose not to deliberately to tie people into iPhones.

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.

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

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".

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Oh wait.

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

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.

Matrix

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Too bad!

Are these the same - what will gsuite users use wtf

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'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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

ba dum tssss.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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)

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

Its not like they assemble billboards

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

  A normal company would have had (...)

  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.

  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. (...)

  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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

That's what made me assume it was a whole stack rather than interface to a backend.

Call it "forced migration" if you must, but it's a distinction without a difference.