Talk Talk
March 24, 2017 9:41 PM   Subscribe

Google announces the formal end of Talk come June, formally supplanting it with Hangouts.
posted by Chrysostom (33 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Have always loved Gtalk for its simplicity and adaptability. Have always hated Hangouts for its bloat and forced-feature-creep. Oh, well. All the useful, interesting, vibrant, creative, weird, inspiring, colorful, hopeful and human parts of the internet seem doomed to get culled in favor of super-not-optimized inbuilt-limited-utility corporate blandness, anyway. I was just organizing my Garden of Dead Sites.

Hey, how about a new subtitle?

MetaFilter: Not Dead Yet
posted by byanyothername at 9:55 PM on March 24, 2017 [24 favorites]


I guess this was predictable, because Hangouts sucks.
posted by uosuaq at 10:09 PM on March 24, 2017 [9 favorites]


Hangouts offers advanced improvements over Google Talk such as group video calling and integration with other Google products.

Tracking, not tracking.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:12 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


I guess this was predictable, because Hangouts sucks.

Compared to Talk, I guess. But Hangouts, as it exists today, sucks significantly less than its alleged replacements (Allo, Duo, Android Messages), which I suppose in due time will all be taken out behind the woodshed and shot so room can be made for something even worse. That seems to be Google's corporate strategy right now.

Bravo, Google. You've made Facebook Messenger the best-of-breed. Facebook fucking Messenger. That's like losing a footrace to someone too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, but only because you decided it'd be fun to saw your own legs off.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:03 PM on March 24, 2017 [28 favorites]


There is no good reason to betray the XMPP open standard.
posted by TwelveTwo at 11:09 PM on March 24, 2017 [10 favorites]


So, also, apparently Hangouts is dropping SMS/MMS messaging capability soon. I'm hoping my Google Voice number will still work...
posted by teatime at 12:06 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hangouts will still do SMS and MMS for Google Voice, just not cell carrier SMS/MMS, which is going back to Messages. The writing has been on the wall for that for over two years, when they started shipping the Nexus 6 and everything since with Messages.

I'm much more annoyed about them not only refocusing Hangouts into a (supposed) Slack competitor, but killing its 5 or 6 year run as the consumer non-SMS messaging app. At least it'll give me a good reason to tell people to use Signal instead. I'm definitely not going to suggest people use other third party apps. To a one they all are battery draining pieces of shit, though none is quite as bad as FB in that respect.

It would be nice if someone else would treat Android as a first class citizen, rather than putting zero effort into Android versions of apps. That's the biggest reason I'm willing to put up with Google's churn. They at least make their shit not break my phone.

It also helps that they have a single interface through which I can see what information they have collected about me and from which I can delete it if I choose. It's a bit creepy to see, but it's much less creepy than the vast majority of sites that don't expose that information to the user.
posted by wierdo at 1:13 AM on March 25, 2017 [7 favorites]


Not even Google knows what's going on with Google's messaging strategy. Sadlarious comment from HN trying to make sense of all the various messaging, chating, voicing and facing apps.

They just don't have it in them to consistently deliver great and reliable customer experiences. Which, as users of Search and Gmail, should scare us all.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:27 AM on March 25, 2017 [8 favorites]


That Hacker News piece is great, but it missed the most WTF of Google's messaging apps: Supersonic Fun Voice Messenger (I'm not making this up), which is an IM program that doesn't have a keyboard. It only takes dictation. Seriously.
posted by Ian A.T. at 3:48 AM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


They just don't have it in them to consistently deliver great and reliable customer experiences.

Google resents that their services are used by humans.

I don't even mean this as snark. I think it is literally true.
posted by ryanrs at 4:24 AM on March 25, 2017 [10 favorites]


I also wonder what will happen to my use of the GrandCentral tech via the Google Voice number. Here I was hoping to get back desktop phone use of the 'unlimited' dialout via a Raspberry Pi 3 but perhaps the cheap per-month way is to use an old droid phone with a shot Li pack, skype and the bluetooth the phone back into the Pi.

At least it is not $100 a month to Ma Bell......
posted by rough ashlar at 5:12 AM on March 25, 2017


At least it'll give me a good reason to tell people to use Signal instead

I'm now gonna have to see if there is a reason to not tie signal into Asterisk and put a broadband.com as the telco interface as they are the backend to Republic Wireless AND are one of the 4 providers of SIP people use in the backend.
posted by rough ashlar at 5:18 AM on March 25, 2017


So, when does Gmail go away, to be replaced with the newly acquired Yahoo mail? Oh wait, they haven't bought Yahoo yet. ;-(
posted by MikeWarot at 6:02 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm hoping my Google Voice number will still work...

What is up with GV, anyway? The last time I tried to get to my GV control panel (on a desktop) I kept ending up on what looked like a page for downloading a mobile app. I never could find a direct way to my Google Voice controls.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:05 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Google may claim to not be evil, but it's pretty obvious they've never claimed to not be mean.
posted by tommasz at 6:07 AM on March 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


Google needs a more flexible motto, to better capture the complexity of operating such a large, influential company. Maybe they should rank their evilness on a scale of 1-10, rather than outright deny it?
posted by ryanrs at 6:26 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Google needs a more flexible motto...Maybe they should rank their evilness on a scale of 1-10,

Google - Today an 8. Tomorrow an 11.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:29 AM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


real talk: I feel they're about a 2
posted by ryanrs at 6:59 AM on March 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


oh no they are retiring google+ circles

first friendster now this
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:11 AM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


And so, Pidgin and Adium have one fewer reason to exist. Perhaps the population of greybeards who run their own XMPP servers will suffice to sustain them in a niche, or perhaps not.

The Pidgin/Adium multiprotocol client has been largely obsoleted by the likes of Franz. This can cope with today's proprietary siloed protocols, because it's essentially a JavaScript-enabled web browser that runs the web interfaces to these systems in different tabs. The downside (other than the total surrender of UI consistency between platforms, of course) is that it is a colossal resource hog compared to old-school XMPP/MSN/ICQ-style clients. But hey, fuck yeah Moore's Law; there's a reason we all have 32Gb of RAM in the liquid-cooled octacore rigs we use primarily for web browsing and checking email, right?
posted by acb at 9:12 AM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


Resources matter when you get several thousand messages a day across a dozen channels (used to be a lot more, but I've cut back).

Then multiply that by 10 years for the searchable archive.
posted by ryanrs at 9:30 AM on March 25, 2017


I was the lead designer on the integration between Talk and Gmail. It was a fun project, but it never really got the resources it needed in order to succeed. It was an important project at the time, because it united disparate messaging platforms with federation via XMPP. We did deals with AOL and Y! to integrate AIM and Y! Messenger. Microsoft wasn't interested. Google funded the project because, at the time, there was a strong feeling that messaging platforms shouldn't be walled gardens. That was the Google of yesteryear (2005 or so). I'm not sure they look at things the same way anymore, as I haven't worked there since 2009.

I fondly remember the sense of victory we felt when we launched the AIM and Y! integrations. Clearly, it didn't work, and the messaging landscape is now at least as much of a mess as it was back then. Things are worse because everyone has adopted Apple's defensive posture on integration, so the platforms won't communicate with each other. The XMPP standard has been around since 1999. /smh

Regardless, it was one of the most fun projects in my career. The rotaticons in Gmail were awesome. I am proud to be one of the people behind the animated "more cowbell" emoticon. That period in Google history was lightning in a bottle, and I have yet to see the magic of its culture replicated (even at my own startup).
posted by drklahn at 10:51 AM on March 25, 2017 [25 favorites]


Oh XMPP, stay alive, please.

http://conversations.im is a great Android app with very light battery use and OMEMO encryption. It has been a perfect simple lightweight way for me and the missus to text each other. Because of how many servers there are to choose from, I even got a 2 letter username.

Only downside: nobody else I know uses it.
posted by anthill at 12:09 PM on March 25, 2017 [6 favorites]


Signal is nice, but I don't see it threatening Facebook Messenger much. I wasn't entirely kidding earlier when I said that FB Messenger is now the best-of-breed in terms of a OTT messaging network.

I love to hate Facebook as much as anybody, but while Google has been wanking their collective hateboner for Slack and WhatsApp, Facebook has been toddling along, doing a sort of two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance of mediocrity with Messenger. And honestly, on a modern Android handset, it's really not that bad.

Hangouts, right now, is better, but since Google is going to destroy that in order to produce some sort of golem with which to satisfy their irrational desire to compete with Slack (can't let anyone else be cooler than you, can you, Google?), that may not be true for very much longer.

The main Facebook app on Android is a steaming pile of digital manure, and I strongly encourage everyone to delete it, because the mobile website is entirely adequate for most basic functions and uses a tiny fraction of the memory/battery footprint. However, the Messenger app is ... I mean, it's bigger than it ought to be, but that's true of most popular Android apps (lookin' at you, Snapchat, you bloated, shambling mess). It seems to be relatively stable, doesn't ANR all the time, and I haven't seen any issues with insane battery consumption or data usage unlike the main app. Whoever is working on it clearly has dodged the mandatory lobotomy that happens to the developers of the main News Feed application.

And unlike any of the other proposed replacements for Hangouts, FB Messenger does in-app carrier SMS/MMS, integrated voice and video, low-friction (one-button-press) image and short-video attachments which are honestly neat (and never worked well for me in Hangouts anyway), unlimited multiple device support including desktops and tablets, and you get a nicely searchable archive (which Hangouts also never had in a decent way). I want to hate it, but it's pretty hard to. Honestly the only thing that sucks about it is that it's made by Facebook. Which is good, I suppose, because it's almost certainly what my social circle is going to move to once Hangouts stops being the default choice.

I just fired up Signal, just for shits-and-giggles, and there's only one person I know (also another crypto nerd) on there. I don't see that one taking off, political appeal be damned; actually I don't see any service that does 100% end-to-end crypto really working for most people. Most users, and I'll include myself here, value the features that you can't easily implement if you're committed to E2E crypto: multiple devices, searchable archive, easy provisioning of new devices and no-data-loss protection against lost ones, web client, etc. Signal is neat, but I'll trade the E2E crypto for the ability to have a conversation follow me from my phone to my work computer and back to my phone and then to a tablet and then to another computer, etc., and then leave me with a searchable log later on, and I'm someone who has been a proponent of cryptography for a long time. Services offering switchable E2E crypto (which both Allo and FB Messenger have, I believe), are probably more realistic in terms of their appeal.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:05 PM on March 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


Oh is that why my google chat suddenly looked different one day?

Am I going to be able to continue to video chat in Hangouts on my phone and my laptop, or is it going to be more new apps?
posted by jeather at 2:23 PM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


From the article: Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1 chats. XMPP federation with third-party services providers will no longer be supported starting June 26.

So we'll still have XMPP. And I thought they stopped federation a few years ago. Surprised it was still working.
posted by zsazsa at 2:31 PM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Signal is neat, but I'll trade the E2E crypto for the ability to have a conversation follow me from my phone to my work computer and back to my phone and then to a tablet and then to another computer, etc., and then leave me with a searchable log later on

Huh? Signal works across multiple devices in exactly this way. (At least if you use iOS.) There's no search functionality that I can find at the moment, but it's got the other more important part.
posted by asterix at 3:53 PM on March 25, 2017


XMPP Fun Fact: If you buy concert tickets via #2 ticket seller that's not Ticketmaster all the different services communicate with each other internally via XMPP: Eg, after you buy the ticket it sends an XMPP message to the PDF generator and then sends an XMPP message to the mailserver to email you the ticket.
posted by wcfields at 4:40 PM on March 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


That's like losing a footrace to someone too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, but only because you decided it'd be fun to saw your own legs off. -- Kadin2048

Oh, so this is the new election thread.

(Sorry.)
posted by rokusan at 7:11 PM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


I don't have a full understanding of how Signal works on iOS because I only use Android, but on Android you can only have one mobile device and one Chrome-based web client device. (It's dependent, at least last I checked, on a Chrome extension, it's not regular Javascript inline code.) And unless they are doing some really... interesting... stuff with cloud storage of keys on iOS, which seems like it'd be controversial given Signal's userbase, I'd be surprised (though impressed) if they don't have similar limitations.

Nothing in the docs seems to suggest they've gotten around it on iOS. Signal's FAQ states that a mobile number can only be linked to one mobile device at a time:
Can I use multiple devices? Why is my device offline?

A number can only be registered to one mobile device at a time. You will have to choose which iPhone, iPad, or iTouch you would like to use. [...] If you've registered on a second device using the same phone number, then (1) your first device will be offline. You will have to uninstall Signal to remove all data. [...] (2) your second device will receive and send all new messages. You can only respond from here. So if you set it up on your iPhone then registered with the same number on your iPad, only your iPad will work as your messenger. Your iPhone will say offline. You will need to re-install Signal on the iPhone to re-register and bring it back online. At this point your iPad will go offline.
This is consistent with how I understand the protocol does key management and forward secrecy; when you register a new device using the same phone number, they invalidate the key associated with the old device (to prevent someone with that device from gaining access to new messages and vice versa) and start using a new key. I think your contacts are also prompted to revalidate your "Safety number".

They also have a Chrome browser extension, "Signal Desktop", which works similarly to the way Motorola Connect used to work (Motorola Connect let you do carrier SMS from your browser): it connects from your browser to your mobile device, and then pushes the actual message out from the mobile device, using that device's private key. Incoming messages go to the device and are decrypted there, then re-encrypted and sent to the browser extension. It's not really true multi-device support, although it's admittedly clever.

Now you could, I suppose, have multiple "Signal Desktop"-type clients against the same mobile device, and I don't see any real reason why those other clients couldn't be other mobile devices (in a sort of master-slave setup with one "master" device with the real key on it, handling all traffic to the network) but at a certain point you have basically just reinvented the server-decrypted architecture used by other messaging systems, only with the (arguable) improvement of having the user run their own 'server' that acts as a gateway between their network of personal devices and the rest of the world. I'm not sure how much that adds for most people.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:11 PM on March 25, 2017


I can't wait til they retire Talk so people will stop using it to IM me in a way that gives me no notification of their message.
posted by bleep at 12:17 AM on March 26, 2017


> The rotaticons in Gmail were awesome.

I seriously, seriously love these. Thank you. It's like the missing evolutionary link between those of us who are old enough to have used emoticons on BBSs, watched IM and chat and text messaging evolve, and now use emoji with abandon on Slack at work. (!)
posted by desuetude at 8:04 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is it ok if I just keep calling it gchat, or will they send the Alphabet enforcers after me now?
posted by Hactar at 8:22 AM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


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