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Google Replaces Gchat With Hangouts Today (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The day dreaded by stubborn office workers around the country has finally arrived. At some point today, Google will replace its Google Talk feature in Gmail -- known colloquially to most of the world as Gchat -- with Google Hangouts. The reasoning: Google's announcement of the switch back in March touts Hangouts' better features and integration with other Google products over the barebones Gchat, which launched way back in 2005.
Everything since GTalk has been garbage.
What's the problem with wanting a low-RAM-footprint, standalone chat program, that I don't have to open up aRAM-guzzling web browser to access?
Big surprise, Google, not everybody spends every waking moment with your browser open (mostly because it's a RAM-guzzling, forced advertising dystopia.).
Seriously, the closest they have to a standalone application for hangouts is a plug-in for Chrome. Fuck Chrome. Why would I just use a browse whose entire purpose is to advertise to me and gather as much information about me as possible.
Firefox + Pidgin is where I'm at right now, but I'm still fuckered into using Hangouts through it because there isn't a good, truly cross-platform (I mean Windows/Linux/Mac/iOS/Android, all of them. Everything is either iOS/Android only or Windows/Mac/Linux only. WTF?) messenger that is worth a damn that I can get people to switch to.
I'm unimpressed to be quite honest. If an app is any good, a user will use it until something better comes along. Google can't understand that and they force users into their versions of whatever popular app exists. Google+ was an example of this kind of shakedown. It's terrible. Facebook is no better but Google+ was simply awful.
If something is good people will use it. Youtube is good so people use it all the time... but Youtube administrative causes a lot of users big trouble. Look at people who lose their revenue because some professional squatting company comes along and files bogus DCMAs against legitimate Youtube users who were merely applying the fair-use rules appropriately in the first place.
Google doesn't really care about you. They don't care about your audience or your beliefs or values. They just want to force their own profit margins and grow their garden of trust until the next big harvest.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Bingo. For my part, it's because Hangouts doesn't play nice with other chat clients, such as Pidgin, whereas GTalk played nice with all of them, given that it was built on an open protocol, XMPP, rather than the proprietary protocol Hangouts uses. While it's possible to get Hangouts working in Pidgin by using some extensions that are buggy and missing key features, it's an inferior experience to what I had with GTalk.
Actually, Google Talk was fricking awesome. Especially when it still supported XMP, and there were a number of desktop and mobile clients for it.
Now this is all history, and you have to use the sanctioned Google app, which does like to crash a lot. So yes, Google Talk was great (at some point). Hangouts is just ok.
Hangout is one of the most ugly programs I have ever used. (yes I use the App on Android, and used to use it on iPad until it got discontinued (( for my iOS version? )) ...) ...
No idea what UI designers think, probably there was none
Why one is replacing a Jabber based communication system with a Hangout bullshit is beyond me.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.