Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix (https://matrix.org), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it enter people's consciousness as one of the most serious contenders for messaging systems.
Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client (https://vector.im/). You can connect to the public server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec and the system are more promising than anything else out there today.
If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my project, Ruma (https://www.ruma.io/), which is a Rust implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.
> a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company
Half of the people reading tune out very quickly around this point.
Most people want something that solves 80% of their problems with 20% reduction in headaches.
I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. I had the same problem when I started to use Signal.
WhatsApp actually seems like the lesser of two evils right now - even though it's controlled by Facebook, they've added encryption and some of my friends are on it.
Who'd have thought we'd look back on the days of MSN, AIM and ICQ as the golden age of interoperable messaging? At least I could talk to everyone I needed to through Gaim (Pidgin) or Trillian.
"Decentralized persistent communication", as long as you either use a centralized homeserver you don't control, or run a hugely resource-hungry and crash-prone homeserver yourself.
I tried running my own for a few months, and resource demands for even a single user in a few moderately popular channels brought down my small ec2 instance.
Eventually I had to shut it down, but now I've lost my ability to authenticate as the user I identified as during that time, until I set up my homeserver again.
Problem is the greatest system in the world is useless unless a quorum of people in your circle are using it. I've been trying to get my friends to use Wire for a year but still have to run skype
This is cool. But IMHO the point of the article is about Google losing its first-mover advantage in chat apps due to wrong branding and prediction for GChat, not interoperability.
I really like the ideas behind Matrix. Sure, the existing (open) clients aren't all that sexy, and synapse can be a bit slow sometimes. But implementing your own client is a breeze and bridging other networks through application services makes it incredibly powerful.
My experience with the matrix.org community has been very pleasant so far. Keep up the good work, folks!
We had a clean, functional chat app in Gchat that supported XMPP federation, a reasonably good file transfer protocol (IIRC it could be implemented by others) and a even emoji.
When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit.
I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.
What Google failed to realize is that people want chat that's connected to other services they frequently use. I'm already browsing FB so it's easy to chat with my FB friends using Messenger rather than both pop over to another service. The same reason why MSFT has tried (much less successfully) to incorporate its chat offerings into Office365 and the reason it bought Skype.
Google was in a position to capture the chat market by tying it to an email service that everyone was using - GMail. But it had two problems: 1. Email is an open service that doesn't lock users in meaning people using Yahoo Mail can still communicate with people using GMail (unlike Facebook where the only place to interact with FB users in is FB). 2. Google didn't lock its users in with GChat, so users could drift away to other services while still communicating with GChat users if need be.
Due to its very nature, FB was destined to win the messenger wars; if all your friends are already on FB then most people will default to what's easiest--the chat functionality that's already there and all your contacts are connected to.
But since FB tends to be your personal circle rather than work circle, this left the work circle open, which Google could have captured if it hadn't screwed up on Hangouts leaving the door open for Slack.
The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values.
But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.
My guess is that it has to do with compatibility with XMPP, but I've never worked with the technology myself so I haven't got a clue. If it is compatibility, then both companies likely continued forward after their products had matured to a certain degree. Perhaps they wanted to go forward, but were constrained by XMPP.
Right before Slack started getting traction I had though of building a Chrome extension/app on top of Gmail and Gchat that did similar things. Sometimes I still think about it, but I think Slack has started to dominate.
The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems to be centralize everything. I think it's because centralized systems are easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it?
Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it.
I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start demanding DRM-FREE social relationships.
Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede control of all facets of your business to third-parties".
Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working well in my desktop client :(
Gchat was (and is) wonderful -- minimal and elegant. I never understood why Google was so hell bent upon trying to move the users from Gchat to Hangout. They would have enough data to know the number of times users clicked 'no' to moving to the new interface!
Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds like such a loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat.
In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down.
GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.
I thought Google Wave had huge potential but the rollout was so poorly handled. It was a group app that only called people in by invitation, so I couldn't add my team members without them having to go through a signup and wait for approval process, killing all momentum.
Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed:
1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc.
2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search.
3. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.
4. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.
I had high hopes for http://shout-irc.com/, but it ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I mentioned.
There's a community forked version with more active developers, features, etc here: https://github.com/thelounge/lounge. Plugin support is still sparse, but there is a packages[0] POC branch, along with a wiki page detailing the ideal plugin/extension/package system[1]
Well it would need a good design too. Let's not say that just piling on features would lead to success. Too many open source projects have already had that perspective... It needs to be fun to use with no learning curve and continue to be fun months down the road.
When Slack first came out, and everyone got all excited about it, I was quite skeptical. I've been using Skype (and lots of other IM systems) for years; do I really want or need something new?
The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop, in my browser, and on my phone.
So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did it do the right things in a narrow technical sense? Absolutely. But without the slick, inviting, easy-to-use UI, it wasn't going to go anywhere. And now that Slack has critical mass, it's hard to imagine Google catching up.
I love Gmail and wish Hangouts got more love. Obviously Gmail is hugely successful in email, and an email address is identity for most services. On the other hand, mobile is where the puck is going, and the base identity for mobile is phone number. Hence, Allo and Duo.
I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously, it's also simultaneously terrifying.
Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.
A really big fan of Gchat here. What I was amazed at in the software was, how reliably it worked no matter how less your internet bandwidth is.
The desktop GTalk app was tiny, handy and powerful. Back when I couldn't afford a wired internet connection in my home, I used to bridge my phone's 2G data to my computer and when nothing else worked with that tiny bandwidth, GTalk did.
Hangouts - is just sad. It loads visibly delayed. Every conversation you click at, again takes milliseconds/seconds to load. Never had this cognitive delay in GTalk. I miss it.
Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations (https://Conversations.im) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…
Hangouts was horrible to me for just one reason - on the smartphone, it hid info on who is online right now.. perhaps this was designed to motivate us to send more messages, but it meant i could no longer easily know if someone might answer now, or if i better try sms/call/.. and then as of recently, Hangouts just fails to notify me of messages, or keeps re-notifying me of old ones, and now i barely use it any more.
Google+ had a similar design decision, when it showed (don't know if this changed) friend suggestions without indicating if those people actually use Google+, or if your adding them to a circle will just spam them to join a social network they don't (want to) use. it's understandable that Google might want to do these things to grow their platforms, but without tact and understanding for what the users really want, they're achieving the opposite.
I may be a resistant one, but I prefer and still use gtalk/gchat/hangouts over slack or any other tool. Slack requires either another tab, a new mobile app or a desktop app, which isn't that great when switching between organisations. At least on my Ubuntu Linux.
Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored.
If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple, that would be great IMHO.
May I ask what made it the best messenger for you? I hated every second I spent on ICQ. The ad-infested client, the fact that if someone else thought 24px purple comic-sans was their identity, I would have to deal with it..
The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an Emoji it was converted back to its text version.
I think it had a simple UI, which for many things worked very well. When I managed the Technical Support for a university using Google Apps for Education, gchat's simple interface was kind of a blessing in that everyone on the campus had it, it was unobtrusive, automatically saved and searchable (though the search could have used some improvements), and you could make calls/video calls without leaving your email.
When it switched to hangouts, a lot of the simplicity left with it in favor of a more social experience; large user-pics on by default (at the beginning I don't think you could customize this either), the windows were significantly bigger, and the text box lost space to the emoji/add picture buttons.
It was a pretty simple, out of the way, and concise chat option with, as far as I could tell, nothing really hidden. What you saw is what you got.
The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.
It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing.
XMPP is a zombie protocol. Yes, it has clients that have better implementation of instant messaging and presence than any other, but it falls apart with real time communication such as voice and video (lol jingle) and there is no practical way of iteroperating with the PSTN. Further, federation of plain text and basic presence worked, but rarely anything more. Connecting with federated users makes no sense to end users, first they have to know it is possible, then they have to figure out how it works and then they learn most features don't work. Even if that wasn't awful enough, it was all dropped by the providers and no longer works.
All commercial platforms are moving away from the protocol, and SIP is now the standard. Problem is that it isn't a great chat protocol for end devices (no standard concept for buddy lists being stored on a server or mobile clients, but many proprietary extensions work well).
As for slack, it is a group chat with slick interface, other than the bizarre account/domain design. It has no encryption of data at rest, and I really wouldn't use it for confidential data. If you are going to use a proprietary closed source solution, at least consider using Cisco Spark.
Now Matrix, it is almost too good to be true, grass roots open standards, federation that makes sense, encryption by design and doesn't lock users into yet another captive island (YACI?). It is also built with the concepts of accounts/SSO, true federation, real time communications in mind. I dream of the day we can kill the PSTN, but with something even more open... Sadly none of the commercial players today are interested. Any one company that thinks they will do it on their own has fallen for their own delusions. Microsoft Skype, Whatsapp and a hapless Google Hangouts... What a mess.
Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts.
It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform.
No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.
> And there are even still some holdout users on old-style Gchat.
I'm not sure if I'm one of those holdouts? I've been using gchat, mostly over XMPP (using adium), and sometimes in Gmail. I frequently search chat history in Gmail.
I didn't realize that gchat had such a tumultuous history.
> Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know
Google nows that, but improvements upon Gchat is not best fit for OKRs and Googler's future resumes. Why not invent another wheel so you can show off next GoogleIO?
Slack nailed it with the notion of teams. You invite someone into a team and there's an instant tachonomy of conversation to join. The ability to be in multiple teams at once is hugely helpful as well.
I remember Gchat as a constant struggle to try and turn off unwanted functionality in Gmail.
I also remember Gchat as being one of a a number of a number of instant messaging options from Google that had very unclear market position and operability (I honestly didn't know that gChat was talking with Google Talk, I thought those where different)
At least now, it is only Hangouts I can't log out of, and at least it doesn't show up in gmail.
[+] [-] Perceptes|9 years ago|reply
Matrix is very usable today via the Vector client (https://vector.im/). You can connect to the public server run by matrix.org, or you can run your own server that federates with all the others if you'd like to maintain ownership of your data. Matrix can also bridge to existing systems like IRC, so there isn't necessarily the need to convince your friends and family to "switch" with you. There are interoperable clients being developed for other operating systems including mobile platforms. Even with client support not all the way there yet, the spec and the system are more promising than anything else out there today.
If you're interested in Rust, you might also want to take a look at my project, Ruma (https://www.ruma.io/), which is a Rust implementation of the Matrix system. It's in very early stages, so don't expect to use it at this point, but it's progressing steadily.
[+] [-] weisser|9 years ago|reply
Half of the people reading tune out very quickly around this point.
Most people want something that solves 80% of their problems with 20% reduction in headaches.
[+] [-] Bromskloss|9 years ago|reply
> You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|9 years ago|reply
Heck you even had the option to federate private servers so one could address users across hosts.
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
WhatsApp actually seems like the lesser of two evils right now - even though it's controlled by Facebook, they've added encryption and some of my friends are on it.
Who'd have thought we'd look back on the days of MSN, AIM and ICQ as the golden age of interoperable messaging? At least I could talk to everyone I needed to through Gaim (Pidgin) or Trillian.
[+] [-] hughes|9 years ago|reply
I tried running my own for a few months, and resource demands for even a single user in a few moderately popular channels brought down my small ec2 instance.
Eventually I had to shut it down, but now I've lost my ability to authenticate as the user I identified as during that time, until I set up my homeserver again.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calanya|9 years ago|reply
It's my smartphone.
Can I just run a 'homeserver' on that and be connected?
[+] [-] frigo_1337|9 years ago|reply
My experience with the matrix.org community has been very pleasant so far. Keep up the good work, folks!
[+] [-] skykooler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|9 years ago|reply
When Google dropped XMPP, it was pretty much the death knell for interoperability. Facebook followed suit.
I don't get the politics that drives the internal chat product development, but it feels like there's a lot of NIH-related "burn it to the ground" going on there. Nothing they do in this space makes sense to me at all.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|9 years ago|reply
Google was in a position to capture the chat market by tying it to an email service that everyone was using - GMail. But it had two problems: 1. Email is an open service that doesn't lock users in meaning people using Yahoo Mail can still communicate with people using GMail (unlike Facebook where the only place to interact with FB users in is FB). 2. Google didn't lock its users in with GChat, so users could drift away to other services while still communicating with GChat users if need be.
Due to its very nature, FB was destined to win the messenger wars; if all your friends are already on FB then most people will default to what's easiest--the chat functionality that's already there and all your contacts are connected to. But since FB tends to be your personal circle rather than work circle, this left the work circle open, which Google could have captured if it hadn't screwed up on Hangouts leaving the door open for Slack.
[+] [-] inopinatus|9 years ago|reply
But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.
[+] [-] zatkin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumdance|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leni536|9 years ago|reply
AFAIK they only dropped federation and support, but I still can connect with any XMPP client.
[+] [-] jalami|9 years ago|reply
Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it.
I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start demanding DRM-FREE social relationships.
Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede control of all facets of your business to third-parties".
[+] [-] Frompo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnain|9 years ago|reply
Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds like such a loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat.
In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down.
GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.
[+] [-] drumdance|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aftbit|9 years ago|reply
1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc.
2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search.
3. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.
4. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.
I had high hopes for http://shout-irc.com/, but it ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I mentioned.
[+] [-] david_ar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxLeiter|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/tree/packages [1] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/wiki/Package-system-desi...
[+] [-] reactor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlandis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reuven|9 years ago|reply
The answer, for me at least, was yes: Slack is new, different, and better. And nearly all of that difference is because of a vastly better UI, on my desktop, in my browser, and on my phone.
So, did Google Chat work? Sure. Did it do the right things in a narrow technical sense? Absolutely. But without the slick, inviting, easy-to-use UI, it wasn't going to go anywhere. And now that Slack has critical mass, it's hard to imagine Google catching up.
[+] [-] chickenbane|9 years ago|reply
I am loyal to Hangouts because everything I read and write becomes easily searchable. I don't want to lose all that history. And it also sounds like an interesting corpus for Google to do the machine learning thing. Obviously, it's also simultaneously terrifying.
Allo and Duo being new apps not only means shedding the extremely unrewarding work of migration / SMS integration / normal legacy from Gchat/Gvoice/etc, but also users immediately understand the Google Assistant is present in their non-incognito conversations. Google might sometimes be creepy, but more often than not Google will be helpful in the chat. I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.
[+] [-] lewisjoe|9 years ago|reply
The desktop GTalk app was tiny, handy and powerful. Back when I couldn't afford a wired internet connection in my home, I used to bridge my phone's 2G data to my computer and when nothing else worked with that tiny bandwidth, GTalk did.
Hangouts - is just sad. It loads visibly delayed. Every conversation you click at, again takes milliseconds/seconds to load. Never had this cognitive delay in GTalk. I miss it.
[+] [-] inputmice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bakhy|9 years ago|reply
Google+ had a similar design decision, when it showed (don't know if this changed) friend suggestions without indicating if those people actually use Google+, or if your adding them to a circle will just spam them to join a social network they don't (want to) use. it's understandable that Google might want to do these things to grow their platforms, but without tact and understanding for what the users really want, they're achieving the opposite.
[+] [-] rekoros|9 years ago|reply
No words.
[+] [-] andersonmvd|9 years ago|reply
Gtalk on the other hand, although searchable, it's not that easy to find what you want. Usually the search result points you into the middle of the conversation and you need to use the damn infinite scroll. And chats in hangouts (video/audio) aren't stored.
If Gtalk could evolve to get the benefits of Slack while keeping it simple, that would be great IMHO.
[+] [-] ronnier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MildlySerious|9 years ago|reply
The only thing that I actually liked was that by pressing backspace on an Emoji it was converted back to its text version.
[+] [-] bluejekyll|9 years ago|reply
Slack is better compared to a simple to use irc. In fact the only thing it really has over irc is UI/ux.
[+] [-] csydas|9 years ago|reply
I think it had a simple UI, which for many things worked very well. When I managed the Technical Support for a university using Google Apps for Education, gchat's simple interface was kind of a blessing in that everyone on the campus had it, it was unobtrusive, automatically saved and searchable (though the search could have used some improvements), and you could make calls/video calls without leaving your email.
When it switched to hangouts, a lot of the simplicity left with it in favor of a more social experience; large user-pics on by default (at the beginning I don't think you could customize this either), the windows were significantly bigger, and the text box lost space to the emoji/add picture buttons.
It was a pretty simple, out of the way, and concise chat option with, as far as I could tell, nothing really hidden. What you saw is what you got.
[+] [-] wtbob|9 years ago|reply
It really makes me sad that it's 2016 and we haven't just updated IRC. Text is cheap: storing every byte every written on an IRC server would cost, essentially, nothing.
[+] [-] jobigoud|9 years ago|reply
Even more reason to keep it compatible with XMPP so that one could use it with his favorite XMPP client.
[+] [-] dade_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|9 years ago|reply
It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform.
No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.
[+] [-] pkaeding|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if I'm one of those holdouts? I've been using gchat, mostly over XMPP (using adium), and sometimes in Gmail. I frequently search chat history in Gmail.
I didn't realize that gchat had such a tumultuous history.
[+] [-] est|9 years ago|reply
Google nows that, but improvements upon Gchat is not best fit for OKRs and Googler's future resumes. Why not invent another wheel so you can show off next GoogleIO?
[+] [-] ec109685|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|9 years ago|reply
I also remember Gchat as being one of a a number of a number of instant messaging options from Google that had very unclear market position and operability (I honestly didn't know that gChat was talking with Google Talk, I thought those where different)
At least now, it is only Hangouts I can't log out of, and at least it doesn't show up in gmail.