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Google Talk, Surprisingly Still Operational, Ends on Thursday (theverge.com) 35

Posted by msmash from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
Google is shutting down Talk (also known as GChat) for good -- its instant-messaging service you probably haven't used much since 2007. From a report: Although Google migrated Talk users over to Google Hangouts in 2017 -- another one of its now-sidelined messaging platforms -- it was still accessible by third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin and Gajim. But Google will cut these last lines of life support on June 16th -- three days from now. In a message on Talk's support page, Google says it's "winding down Google Talk" and will no longer support third-party apps, citing its initial announcement in 2017. Users who try to sign into GChat after the 16th will see a sign-in error. If you still want to use Pidgin through Google services, Pidgin recommends using this plugin for Google Chat instead.
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Google Talk, Surprisingly Still Operational, Ends on Thursday More

Google Talk, Surprisingly Still Operational, Ends on Thursday

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  • Already Happened? (Score:5, Informative)

    by pepsikid ( 2226416 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @04:28PM (#62616722)

    I found Pidgin refuses to connect since Saturday night. And the Google Chat plugin also fails.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xwin ( 848234 )
      I am connected with MirandaNG right now. I use the google talk all the time to chat with my wife and co-workers. It was very useful with the 3rd party app like miranda. I will be transitioning to some other messenger that has third party support. Google is trying to make you use Chrome for everything so you stay signed in and they track you. I hate the fact that a simple messenger app that takes 9MB of memory as a native app, will take close to 1GB when run as a browser app.
      On PC you have a choice and min

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        There aren't many options left. Google Talk had an API so other apps could use it, but the replacement Google Chat doesn't seem to. It's hard to find out because "google chat" is such a generic term it's difficult to google, and you get loads of unrelated results.

        People use it for IoT stuff, to send notifications to their phones. The only alternative that seems half decent is Telegram, but I don't really want to install that app just for hobby IoT stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      https://support.google.com/acc... [google.com]

      Using 2FA & app password still works in both Trillian and Pidgin, but the 16th will end Google Talk service. I haven't tried Google Chat plugin in Pidgin yet though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      I stopped using it back in 2012 or so when they started refusing logins saying they "couldn't verify my device" or something when I tried to log in with Pidgin or Adium. I'd have to log in to Google with a web browser to verify it was me, then reconnect with the XMPP client, and then flush out all the Google cookies (I don't use other Google services, I block their trackers). They initially did it when I changed countries (I used to travel between Hong Kong and Australia a lot), then on any IP address cha

    • Whoops, sorry that the Google Chat plugin is failing for you. Can you open an issue on the githubs and I'll take a look at what's going on?

  • I've been using Hangouts right along on my phone, though Chat is in Gmail so I don't bother on any PC. And I get these continuing reports of its planned obsolescence. I recall Google+ was really useful for me, but it never attracted enough audience to sustain the effort. Now the ambiguity as Google tries to make a compelling whatever that wins in whatever market they are aiming at. Messages for the Web is a lot more interesting.

    But Google like some other outfits tries to strike gold, and we watch seemingly

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      Google+ never stood a chance due to Google. If you happened to violate their somewhat ambiguous rules there, you lost all google services, so it just wasn't worth the risk.

      So off it goes to the island of misfit apps.

  • Google Messaging used to useful, but has increasingly become the joke that it currently is. I'm not sure how those Google meetings actually go, but MY GUESS is "hey, how do we screw this up" followed by "why don't we remove features that our loyal customers love!"

    Next up, Google Voice. Slowly becoming less than it used to be.

    • Not slowly at all. They killed the basic web interface and the ability to send messages from the plugin a long time ago.

  • It ended it earlier for some (Score:3)

    by Sleeping Kirby ( 919817 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @04:42PM (#62616760)
    For me, it's been about a week since I couldn't connect. Pidgin's page as a plugin that I needed to compile to continue using google talk. Admittedly, it's a bit of a hack as you need to extract some sort of cookie id, but it works.
    • The "extract an oauth cookie hack" is because the APIs i use in the plugin aren't public so there's no way to request scope to them. Instead we get an "uber auth" token that lets you have access to every Api in Google, whether it's public or private. It used to be easier to set up, once upon a time, but after Pokemon Go was found to have been using the same uber auth a few years ago, there was a bit of a crackdown from Google to make that a bit tougher. Could have been easier if Pidgin had an embedded web
      • Oh, I meant no disrespect and I totally understand why it had to be done this way. I only meant it as a general user experience that looking into network calls feels a bit like a hack. Heck, if I figure out a better way to do it I'll drop a line (standing up a server, web extension, etc.).

  • Add that to the list of noteable things I remember Google killing: DejaNews, Google Talk, Google Voice, G+, Google Sites, Google Bookmarks, Tilt Brush, YouTube VR, Google Reader, Google Wave, and Google Buzz. Google Voice technically isn't dead yet, but over the past few years it's been less and less reliable and it's stopped forwarding text messages for me. I'm pretty sure they only created it so they could have a legal way to snoop on people's phone calls to build a corpus for STT and other AI models.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I think you can make a strong argument that Google Search was killed and replaced by something that happens to also be named Google Search.

        I too yearn for the days when it was useful. It's getting to the point where I think we need an AI to read the results, filter out all the AI-generated shit and clearly promoted material, discard results that Google is artificially promoting, and give us an unbiased summary that spans multiple pages of results.

        Even the little trick of "site:reddit.com" is becoming less u

    • Google Voice technically isn't dead yet, but over the past few years it's been less and less reliable and it's stopped forwarding text messages for me. I'm pretty sure they only created it so they could have a legal way to snoop on people's phone calls to build a corpus for STT and other AI models.

      Google didn't create Google Voice - as with many of their offerings, they bought out an independent company (Grand Central) and then rebranded its product.

  • enjoy the patents, Google (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @05:22PM (#62616822)

    I worked on VoIP when most people were still using dial-up. Our company had developed a good jitter buffer that was coupled to a good codec. The company, for better or worse, liked patents. The company eventually sold to a competitor, along with those patents. A few years later Google bought the company that owned our tech. Google still holds patents with my name on them related to VoIP. I doubt any of that tech is still in use, but who knows. I think some if had made it into Google Talk back in the day.

  • Google had a great product with Gtalk, a lot of tech savvy people used it back in the day but suddenly they decided to kill it and replace with hangouts, which I can only assume was a decision done by a middle manager that wanted to push the product they were supervising to get notoriety inside the company with no second thought on what could happen to the current user base, there was no dedicated hangouts app for the desktop (the gtalk one was really simple and useful), the phone app was crap and people ju

  • How many? (Score:3)

    by Parker Lewis ( 999165 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @05:53PM (#62616888)
    I really got lost in the list of the dead or alive Google chat/meeting apps. Allo, Hangouts, Messenger, Voice, Chat, Meet, Duo...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Google Chat seems to be the current on. I can't see any real difference between Chat and Hangouts. Never used the others.

      • The big difference is you can't just make a video call from Chat like you could with Hangouts. The button just sends an email that you would like them to join a meeting... fairly bullshit since video calls from non phone-number devices were one of the killer apps for me.

    • The funny thing, if Google had added all the features of the other messenger apps into Google Talk as XMPP extensions instead of creating a new service each time they changed strategy on messaging, then they wouldn't be in the mess they are today.
  • I don't know if I'll ever think of Google again without associating it with "abandonware."

  • A few years ago, Apple released a software upgrade for the Airport Express, a product it had discontinued nearly 10 years prior. Apple still supports its OS for at least 5 years after it is deprecated. So does Microsoft. I frequently wonder what life is like for the programmers and engineers who have to do legacy maintenance. Are they considered freaks within the company? Do they work in the basement? Are they fired after their product, like Google Talk, is finally killed?

  • Yes! Every time Google cancels something I feel vindicated and thank my lucky stars I never relied on them for anything important (well except for the gmail based email my main client uses, and a gmail account I use for account recovery... and google search, that's pretty fucking important to me.. and play store for my Boox, that's required... but nothing else! I swear! :/ ) Also I have to say downloading from gmail via IMAP is really slow. Of course it is! They can't sell ads over IMAP, yet. Looking at sel

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      I am frankly surprised they haven't cut out IMAP and POP access yet. Even commercial email servers love to disable standard protocols by default to control the email client experience, and it would be incredibly consistent with current Google mindset.

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