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The Days of Google Talk Are Over (techcrunch.com)
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.
So the chat tab within Gmail and the hangouts Android application remain, right? Only the windows Gtalk executable is being phased out?
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!
The good news about this is, maybe it's a sign that they weren't really scanning everyone's phone calls including critical business strategy conference meetings.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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).
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?
#DeleteFacebook
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....
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I thought it was dead for many years.
I dropped almost everything google, but occasionally scan gnews, after they changed the interface on maps for no reason. For everything that I used google for, ddg works perfect as does firefox. I missed google and chrome initially, but got over it in about a week. I'm sure I'm not a demographic they care about, good luck to them..
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?
ICQ is still working, even in thirdparty clients. Beat this, google.
Because Google suffers from the same CADT syndrome as your typical free software project: Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. — Jamie Zawinski
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
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.
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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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/...
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.
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 :)