The Days of Google Talk Are Over (techcrunch.com) 68
The days of Google Talk are quickly coming to an end. An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: As the company announced today, the messaging service that allowed Gmail users to talk to each other since it launched in 2005, will now be completely retired. Even while Google pushed Hangouts as its consumer messaging service (before Allo, Duo, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet) over the last few years, it still allowed die-hard Gtalk users (and there are plenty of them) to stick to their preferred chat app. Over the next few days, these users will get an "invite" to move to Hangouts. After June 26, that switch will be mandatory.
Gmail's chat tab and hangouts (Score:2)
So the chat tab within Gmail and the hangouts Android application remain, right? Only the windows Gtalk executable is being phased out?
Re:Gmail's chat tab and hangouts (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. No. Maybe. Who knows. It doesn't matter. Whatever the answer is today, tomorrow may bring a completely different answer. It's Google, where everything's in beta until it's randomly announced it will soon be shut down with no reason why.
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Exactly. Be happy they gave you a timeline & didn't cancel it today.
Why move to hangouts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they tell those users to move to Hangouts, when they've already started telling hangouts users to move to Allo, Duo, and Messages?
Google seriously needs to stop this. The way to improve a product isn't to scrap it and build a new one every 6 months, but to upgrade the existing one. People get used to your existing product and want to keep using it. worse yet, people on your old product can't talk to people on your new product, and right now you have at least 3 generations of incompatible product in operation!
Re: Why move to hangouts? (Score:2)
Right because AOL was good enough and about as far as we could get on our own.
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Google seriously needs to stop this.
While they're at it, what's with the stupid "Play" brand? It's a app store, what's wrong with calling it an app store? Play should be a category of app, but in Google newspeak, an app is a kind of play. Google's branding makes no sense whatsoever, maybe consider reducing the hallucinogenic content in their smart water.
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Apple has the rights to "app store" so Google had to name it something else. Unfortunately "Application" isn't hip enough.
Play unfortunately has connotations that all it contains is games though.
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Its because of the fact "Play" branding is used for more than just apps. They have the "Play Store", "Play Movies", "Play Music", and I believe a few others, too. It is all in the marketing.
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Its because of the fact "Play" branding is used for more than just apps. They have the "Play Store", "Play Movies", "Play Music", and I believe a few others, too.
Brilliant. They all sound stupid and make people less interested in bothering with them. The whiteboard team who came up with this plan deserves a shiny new participation trophy, to put on the shelf with the rest of them.
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"Program Shop"
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It used to be Android Market.
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The way to improve a product isn't to scrap it and build a new one every 6 months,
Lets not exaggerate. Google Talk was introduced 12 years go. Hangouts came 8 years later. Allo, 3 years after that.
I understand that it can be tough to let go of old applications, but sometimes a software company can no longer support it.
For old desktop programs, that just meant that it may or may not work anymore as systems are upgraded (as long it it uses only local resources and just isn't a client for an internet service). For web based applications though, it means they go away. Either embrace web
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Either embrace web based software and accept that or stick to traditional style desktop software.
I prefer not to embrace spy on me,,, errr web based software. Thank you very much.
Why move to shiny and new? Because of CADT (Score:2)
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The only thing moving out of hangouts is the carrier SMS. If you use phone company SMS, then that moves out of Hangouts because google never tamed the carriers and their insane requirements.
Everything else is still moving into hangouts. If you're using google voice SMS then it still stays in Hangouts.
If you want Hangouts stuff to move somewhere else, you'll have to give them another year or two to enhance the thrash plan.
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This makes no sense, though. If they are positioning Hangouts as a business-class offering then why gut SMS when that is a feature that is useful to business users? I really like Google Voice and the SMS part of that still works (crossing fingers!) so it's not like they're abandoning carrier interoperability for SMS, so why not just keep it part of Hangouts to provide a unified suite to Hangouts users?
Moreover, the name Hangouts does not strike me as button-down business-y in the first place, but I guess al
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the reason why it happens is that some group at google finds a fatal flaw in a project: they didn't write it. so they write a new project with the same functionality, but a different, "cleaner" interface. then the next group finds a fatal flaw in the new project.
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Because Allo and Duo are mobile only, Hangouts is the only solution that works on Desktop a.l.a Skype.
silver lining (Score:2)
XMPP still supported (Score:5, Informative)
From what the email I received from Google says, chatting over XMPP using a client like Pidgin or Adium should continue to work after the GTalk stuff is shut down in Gmail:
The talk about federation is referring to using Google Apps on your own domain. They dropped federation years ago for gmail.com, but I never knew they had kept it for private domains.
Keeping XMPP support at least is fortunate because Hangouts still lacks basic features like buddy lists. No, I don't want my entire list of contacts to me my buddies for hangouts. And yes I do want to see who's actually logged in at the time. Seems like Google isn't really sure what hangouts is. Is it just glorified SMS messaging (IE not necessarily interactive), is it Google voice? Is it Google Chat?
Sadly, Google doesn't seem to care that much about end users. Though I guess it's not surprising since we really are the product, not the customer. Google has done some amazing things that provide incredible conveniences to us, but I'm getting really tired of all the ADD hipsters that seem to have taken over on their development teams. It's getting rather fatiguing to have Google screwing up all the services I actually used (Picasa, GTalk, Google Voice).
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I know your comment was intended to be funny, but the reality is that they *have* already started asking Hangout users to switch to Allo, Duo, or Messages.
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Google's way or the highway (Score:2)
Anyone know how to force the stupid "status bubble that only shows up on mouseover and doesn't even display the full URL unless you wait two seconds" into a normal always-there status bar with full URLs always shown instantly on mouseover, like all the other sane browsers?
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Anyone know how to ... a normal always-there status bar with full URLs always shown instantly on mouseover
Sure: https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]
So how does all this affect Project Fi? (Score:4, Interesting)
So how does all this affect Project Fi? And the SMS and voice mail and calling support that's integrated in gmail and hangouts?
I am SO confused....
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SMS? Voice mail? Let me guess you still have business cards too. Your generation is weird.
#wtfiswrongwiththoseoldneckbeards.
^ The modern youth.
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Whoever marked this as troll has either no sense of humour or cried himself to sleep when he realised that the above was not actually funny but a sad reflection of the modern world.
Strange (Score:1)
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On the other hand, if you just stuck to SMS or email like sane people you'd be able to use the same ones since 1993 or the early 1970s, and they have the added benefit of being the ones that reaches the most people too.
So the real question is, why would people in this day and age still use a limited proprietary chat feature that works for such a small percentage of the population, and needs to be replaced every year or so?
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If there were decent non-proprietary two way SMS desktop integration, I'd use it. We don't all like to look at tiny screens and torture our fingers the whole day.
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Was about to say something about SMSes costing money, but remembered that effectively-free SMSes (10s of thousands per month included in subscriptions) was a thing already at the turn of the millennium :)
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ICQ is still working, even in thirdparty clients. Beat this, google.
No problem! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like it's high time to completely boycott all of these stupid services that google makes.
I swear, I have never in my life met a company with such unbelievably severe, systemic organizational ADD, such that they can't seem to keep any of their services in operation for more than a few years before they get bored and try to convince everyone to change to something else.
It's to the point where I'm honestly surprised that Google Maps is still available.
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There have been tons of companies like that. The difference is, google is the only one that manages to remain so popular through such a long series of product abandonments.
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Which only makes me realize that I can never be a politician or a business person. I just can't bullshit people in a way that, when I spit in their eye, they just raise their arms in cheer and shout, "More!"
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I was referring specifically to Google's social media nonsense. I've never relied on gmail for the exact reasons you state.
I've tried to use duckduckgo, but their search results quite simply arn't as good a lot of the time, and I am invariably forced to use google anyway. They may be unable to do anything else right, but their search tools are still the benchmark that everyone else strives to reach.
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Seriously? You're really going there? Do you really have that much difficulty seeing the bigger picture here?
It was *their* choice to offer the service for free. It was *their* choice to call out to all and sundry, "Please! Use our free service!" *They* were actively encouraging, if not demanding, people use their services, to the point where google was forcibly tying their social media platforms into everything else.
Then they took it away and said, "Just kidding! Use THIS free service instead!"
Then t
I'm amazed they still have this page up. (Score:3)
I'll post my comment before I post the text. Fuck you google not for abandoning another service, but for making me believe.
From here
https://developers.google.com/... [google.com]
What is "service choice" and how does Google Talk enable it?
Service choice is something you have with email and, for the most part, with your regular phone service today. This means that regardless of whom you choose as your email service provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, your school or ISP, etc), you can email anyone who is using another service provider. The same applies to phone service. You can call someone even if they do not use the same phone company as you do. This allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want.
Unfortunately, the same is not true with many popular IM and VOIP networks today. If the people you want to talk to are all on different IM/VOIP services, you need to sign up for an account on each service and connect to each service to talk to them.
The Google Talk network supports open interoperability with hundreds of other communications service providers through a process known as federation. This means that a user on one service can communicate with users on another service without needing to sign up for, or sign in with, each service.