A history of Google messaging apps

August 25, 2021 2:08 PM

Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica walks down memory lane and covers Google's various messaging app offerings over the past decade and a half. It's even more of a mess than you think.
posted by coolname (59 comments total)

This article is amazing, and it has taken me the better part of the day to finish it in between other things. I think perhaps my favorite bit is this throwaway:

In 2021, Google completely re-launched Google Pay. It threw out the old codebase that had previously existed first as Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay, and the company instead rolled out a completely different "Google Pay" product it had developed in India. This product was originally called "Google Tez." Users making the transition lost their contact list and a lot of functionality, so we basically saw the shutdown of one service called "Google Pay" and the launch of a completely separate, new service, also called "Google Pay."

Between all the various things called "Hangouts" or "Chat" it's a wild ride.
posted by fedward at 2:21 PM on August 25, 2021 [13 favorites]

Just reading the Table of Contents is painful.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:21 PM on August 25, 2021 [11 favorites]

What has Google NOT completely fucked up?
posted by bleep at 2:33 PM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

OK Google Sheets is good.
posted by bleep at 2:33 PM on August 25, 2021 [11 favorites]

I loaded up Hangouts on my phone on Monday(?) and I got a notification that it was now integrated in Gmail and did I want to go there? So I said yes and it took me to my regular Gmail inbox with no way to send a Hangouts message. So I loaded Hangouts up again and this time said "no" and it worked fine. I guess this means that the standalone Hangouts app isn't long for this world.

I use Hangouts pretty much only for chatting with my family and its fine for what we use it for and being able to search through our chats and emails together is quite nice because half the time my wife will email me something and half the time she'll send it via chat and this way I can check both in the same place.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:35 PM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Google makes a lot of good, mostly free stuff but they tend to suck at social because, you know, engineers...
posted by jim in austin at 2:37 PM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Google has previously defended this hands-off management style as "letting a thousand flowers bloom,"

Did they actually use that phrase? Because that phrase has a history...
posted by clawsoon at 2:39 PM on August 25, 2021 [17 favorites]

...not a good history.
posted by clawsoon at 2:39 PM on August 25, 2021 [18 favorites]

so we basically saw the shutdown of one service called "Google Pay" and the launch of a completely separate, new service, also called "Google Pay."

This reminds me of the NSA funded Microsoft purchase of Skype (decentralised) and pivot into Microsoft Teams (server hosted) and makes me wonder how many of these seemingly random changes were prompted by the NSA dragnet?
posted by Lanark at 2:42 PM on August 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

>OK Google Sheets is good.

They'll probably cancel it next year then.
posted by Catblack at 2:48 PM on August 25, 2021 [17 favorites]

I still have Google Voice. All that number gets now is spam. And Google has made it impossible to shut down. Good times.
posted by heyitsgogi at 2:51 PM on August 25, 2021 [5 favorites]

Gmail has been fantastic for me since I got an invite from a fellow mefite all those years ago. I've had my @gmail.com account now longer than I've lived at any one physical address or had work emails. My one rock. If gmail went away, I'd be pretty devastated.

Similarly we've run our custom domain/email off a grandfathered and free Google sites account. Very happy with it.

Doc/Sheets is pretty great. I've written grant applications in it (which it's really great for when your coPIs are in three different timezones) . I never use the powerpoint clone, so no comment there.

Drive/Photo has been a literal lifesaver a couple of times. though We're "diversifying our portfolio" there with copies of the really important stuff into a couple of other services there too.

Keep is a real little gem. It's the way my wife and I do our bulletin board/swear jar lists.

Chromecast has gone from hot garbage to not entirely terrible. We use it daily. I still don't actually like it though. But it is better than most other things.
posted by bonehead at 2:59 PM on August 25, 2021 [5 favorites]

In 2021, Google completely re-launched Google Pay.

Perhaps surprisingly, the main guy responsible for disaster this just got booted.

Uh, I mean, he left "to pursue other exciting opportunities and spend more time with his family".

I've spoken before about how the Google promotion culture is largely to blame for this type of clusterfuck, but in retrospect I don't think I've been sufficiently hard on the people I now view as mostly responsible (outside of the promotion system disaster) -- product management.

I don't believe I have ever encountered a more incompetent (or maliciously ambitious) product management organization. They will dedicate their lives to outmaneuvering one another (and backstabbing their own engineers) in order to kill mildly successful products so that they can launch their own half-assed successor in an effort to get promoted.

Senior management doesn't help by constantly talking about PMs as the people who "own" a given technical area, never mind that I've yet to meet a PM who had any fucking clue about the technical fundamentals of the field within which they operate (beyond "yay, more buzzwords I can use when representing my area to other PMs who are equally ignorant!").

PMs have weaponized the promotion nightmare more than any other group in Google (IMO), and they do it with a weird rapacious glee that boggles the mind. You can be personally responsible for earning hundreds of millions of dollars in new annually-recurring revenue, and not get promoted because you didn't play the political game correctly, doubly so if you have the misfortune to be an SWE rather than a PM.

Their PGMs can be quietly competent people, but the PMs are uniformly psychotic and they've seized control of the business.
posted by aramaic at 3:07 PM on August 25, 2021 [51 favorites]

I used to use gchat constantly. I still use it with a few friends. It's OK, though not as nice as before. But what really bothers me is I now have zero ability to search my old gchats (or my new hangouts). It feels like I've effectively lost well over a decade of data.
posted by prefpara at 3:20 PM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

To be fair a lot of these technologies cannibalized each other. If anything it shows the importance, or lack, of marketing. Had these been branded as one and shown a coherent UX/UI strategy most of the failures would have gone unnoticed. Google for better or worse is truly an engineering company.

Wave is a bit ahead of its time. I feel as if Google Wave's features are pretty embedded into Slack and Discord.
posted by geoff. at 3:21 PM on August 25, 2021

Gmail has been fantastic for me...

Generally, yes. But, I’ve been having a real problem with continual spam coming to one of my Gmail accounts, that I can’t seem to resolve. The odd bit is that all of the spam is addressed to both [e-mail] andcc’ed to [e-mail]. Even the long headers have the aol address. I’ve never had an aol address in my life, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to simply tell Gmail “hey, anything coming in using an aol address is spam, so please kill it with fire.”
posted by Thorzdad at 3:22 PM on August 25, 2021

bonehead has done a good job listing out the really good apps that Google has released and kept around. Honestly, that list is pretty phenomenal. With Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Photo, and Keep, you have basically everything to need to run internal comms for an org, except some kind of chat/slack option. And this is why it is just insane that Google can't figure this out, despite decades of trying.

I'm not a google-stan, but building software is hard, and making a bunch of separate apps via separate teams and then have them all work together seamlessly is exponentially harder. For all the shit they get, Google has done a good job with most of it. If they could just get real-time chat figured out...
posted by nushustu at 3:47 PM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

This article is fantastic. It's so useful just to have a summary of all of Google's strategic failures in this product space. See also Killed by Google.

Google has previously defended this hands-off management style as letting a thousand flowers bloom, but the company's messaging situation is more like a yard full of weeds—neglected, embarrassing, and damaging to the company's reputation.

I worked at Google at the beginning of all this, the "we could just add chat to Gmail and call it Google Talk" days. There was no strategy then, chat just seemed like an easy thing to do. I also think there never was a strategy, at least not until the horrible debacle of Google+ (which was responsible for several of the missteps in this article).

My fear is part of why there's no product strategy is no one really thinks it's strategic. I mean all the Google executives came up in the time of ICQ and Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Google employees all used AIM until 2005 or so! All those products failed to produce any strategic value for their owners and I fear the lesson taken was "chat is not an important product category".

The clear failure of that lack of strategy was iMessage. For 12 years iOS has had a superior texting experience to Android. For lots of reasons, some technical and most political. But what a mess; it's a significant cause of Apple lock-in to this day. I think RCS messaging is finally in a place where it's feature parity with Apple with the one extra enormous feature of being an open ecosystem. (I disagree with the author's dismissal of it.) But even now it still feels like an unloved product category.
posted by Nelson at 3:50 PM on August 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

Pours one out for Google Wave.
posted by riverlife at 3:59 PM on August 25, 2021 [7 favorites]

I've been so confused lately trying to figure out if I should use Duo, Meet, Chat, or Hangouts. This helps explain at least part of my confusion. I just wish there was a cross-platform video chat option that was as simple as Facetime. Go to a person's contact and you can either call them, message them, or facetime them. It's perfect and simple. Google has needlessly made this all SO complicated.

And while I'm shaking my fist at the sky, I'm need to announce my annoyance at Google Maps. I love Google Maps, but I hate that every few months, they seem to rearrange the interface and make it hard for me to find the options I'm looking for (traffic or streetview or satellite, for example).
posted by hydra77 at 4:27 PM on August 25, 2021 [9 favorites]

It is kind of weird that here in 2021, I'm still using SMS for all of my messaging. I use the Signal app but because no one else uses it, it just defaults to SMS which makes my very secure messaging app totally insecure but I'm not sure what else to do.
posted by octothorpe at 4:38 PM on August 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

I've been using Hangouts for years to chat (& share links) with my husband.
Really handy having a messaging app which can send and receive whether we're using our phones or the computer.

My husband's desktop just forcibly switched him from Hangouts to "Google Chat" and he's no longer receiving notifications.
posted by cheshyre at 4:39 PM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

At work, we started paying for Slack's enterprise grid before we migrated from Office 365 to GSuite. Years later, I still refuse to use Hangouts, which simply cannot replace what we've already enabled through Slack

Every once in a while, I'll look at the Chats label in Gmail and see failed attempts to ping me and just laugh.
posted by emelenjr at 4:42 PM on August 25, 2021

I don’t even work for Google but I think I could have written 75% of what aramaic said [very well]. It is so obvious even from the outside that Google’s hero-worship culture would invariably produce Product Managers who care for nothing other than justifying their (enormous) paycheck, and out-doing one another. How quickly and how often have UI/UX changes been made that create such little new value for the user, compared to the hassle of millions having to adjust and adapt their workflows? Because some asshat in Product Marketing heard about a cool new technique/platform/paradigm/resume-enhancing-acronym , and was afraid of being out done by a peer. That’s how.

It’s funny that such a large and successful company operates via drivers not so different than a typical highschool culture.

Disclaimer: my ladyfriend works for the Goog, but as a contractor far removed from all the Product Management shenanigans.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 4:50 PM on August 25, 2021 [9 favorites]

aramaic, that sounds like what I've heard about Microsoft, and how they've largely failed to have successful products that broke out of the Windows/Office duopoly, with occasional exceptions such as Xbox. The divisions compete against each other, with the Windows and Office people having a vested interest in keeping their fiefdoms powerful, with the result that the company would spend many years and dollars pursuing things such as their mobile OS but never making much of it because of all the daggers in its back.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:01 PM on August 25, 2021

I had to double-check the dates, but yes, YouTube chat (which, the article notes, became very popular with children, who used it to skirt parental controls) launched in August 2017, AFTER the premier of Silicon Valley season 4 in April 2017, where the same thing happened to Pied Piper's PiperChat.

The chronology of the satire, it's the wrong way around!
posted by other barry at 5:20 PM on August 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

Back in the late 90's my public sector IT co-worker and I mocked up wireframes and architecture diagrams of a new email "concept" intended to address various records management challenges with traditional email. Instead of an email server sending multiple copies of messages that could get forwarded to others, our idea was that there would be one message-object that the sender/owner could add/revoke access to. Recipient/participants would be able to add comments (instead of "replying") and could be delegated to add others as opposed to "forwarding." The beauty was there'd only ever be one object to archive, retrieve, disclose, etc. Nothing ever happened because it turns out we sucked at pitching, weren't engineers, and no one understood why this was "better" than email. Ten years later when I heard about Google Wave I thought "OMG! This is what we we trying to do!" Then I saw a demo.... Between that catastrophe and then the Google Buzz nonsense the following year, I had a strong mind to very nearly think about maybe giving up my Gmail account and moving off the Google platform. Almost.
posted by majorsteel at 5:58 PM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

The odd bit is that all of the spam is addressed to both [e-mail] andcc’ed to [e-mail]. Even the long headers have the aol address. I’ve never had an aol address in my life, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to simply tell Gmail “hey, anything coming in using an aol address is spam, so please kill it with fire.”

I think you can set up a filter to do this. Apologies if you've already tried this, but if you click the gear icon for Settings, then "See all settings", then "Filters and blocked addresses," you should be able to then create a filter on messages addressed to [e-mail], and have it automatically delete them. I'm not 100% sure that works for cc addresses, though, but if you haven't tried it already it could be worth a go.
posted by biogeo at 6:11 PM on August 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

Yeah, Gmail's filters run before its spam classifier does, and "mark this mail as spam" is an available filter action. So even if you can't teach the adaptive automatic spam classifier to understand that you don't have an AOL address, a handmade filter should be able to get that job done for you.
posted by flabdablet at 7:55 PM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

On the one hand, I like that Google is willing to try new things. On the other hand, I hate that their metric for success is waaaay too high, so nice things just get tossed in the bin even though the cost of maintaining something that isn't getting feature updates is a rounding error on their balance sheet.

I could do without Ron Amadeo's weekly "Google sucks, yo" articles. At least this one has some meat to it and provides something useful to have for posterity.
posted by wierdo at 10:04 PM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think the root of the problem is Google's phenomenally profitable dominance of Internet advertising. If Google had a normal level of profit they could realistically increase that profit by developing a new product; and the costs of development would be significant enough that their decision would represent a genuine commitment.

Unfortunately, every new product ultimately disappoints Google because it isn't remotely as profitable as their advertising business. That doesn't stop them, though, because they're so rich that they can always discard their work and try again. Consequently, Google is perpetually adopting and discarding projects when really they should just be sitting in a solid gold bathtub filled with cocaine while burning billion-dollar banknotes.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:51 PM on August 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

It's interesting as I've been using Google messaging systems pretty much since the original Google talk. And sometimes I don't get any notifications, sometimes it's quicker on my phone or my computer. It's weird how they improve good product pointlessly, I have to assume the psychotic PM frenzy is the reason, because what else is there? I finally had to stop using Chrome on my mobile because of the pointless updates with no real purpose, I can't stop tabs from grouping anymore for instance, and it started defaulting to this weird home screen rather than the last page I was actually on. Just frustrating.
posted by Carillon at 11:52 PM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

It seems so weird, in retrospect, but I used to *trust* Google. Don’t Be Evil and all that. Heck, I even used Google Buzz. I even made a close friend through Google Buzz. The shutdown of Reader was the point where I stopped trusting them.

Now almost nothing could get me to start using a new Google product. Heck, even my GMail account is slowly filling up, and Google’s solution is to ask me to pay them for additional storage. I have no faith that they’ll honor any commitment, so I’ll have to figure out some other solution.

That chart at the bottom, with the cost of supporting Reader versus the cost of people losing trust in the company applies perfectly in my case.
posted by Kattullus at 2:50 AM on August 26, 2021 [11 favorites]

So I said yes and it took me to my regular Gmail inbox with no way to send a Hangouts message. So I loaded Hangouts up again and this time said "no" and it worked fine.

It will pester you again from time to time. On my Android phone in Gmail you click on the little callout icon at the bottom of the screen (second from left) and it takes you to the chat screen. Annoyingly, now every time I have a chat message I get two notifications for the same thing - one from Hangouts and one from Gmail.

I use Hangouts pretty much only for chatting with my family and its fine for what we use it for and being able to search through our chats and emails together is quite nice because half the time my wife will email me something and half the time she'll send it via chat and this way I can check both in the same place.

This is exactly my use case by now - 99% of my hangouts use is to bother my lovely wife while she's working . Sometimes our discussion will get complicated enough to warrant promotion to an actual email thread - stuff that is not for immediate action or when somebody else needs to be roped in etc. It is nice to be able to search for everything in one place but the fact that transition to a voice/video call is super clunky in the new interface will very likely make us switch to something else.
posted by each day we work at 2:53 AM on August 26, 2021

I've never used any Google chat offering. My chat history so far has been: ICQ, irc, Viber/Whatsapp.

Viber has completely replaced any messaging/chatting solutions I might need. Almost everyone in my circle has it, it has E2E encryption, both private and group chats, multimedia, text, audio calls, video calls, and probably many more features I don't ever use. People who are not on Viber are using Whatsapp, which has a similar list of features.

I think apps like these basically replaced the iMessage functionalities on Android.

I can't remember the last time I sent an SMS or had to use Slack/Discord/anything else. Except, of course, bloody Teams for work and kids' online school, and I hate Teams with a passion.

Seeing the list in the article just reaffirmed my decision not to bother with any new apps/services coming from Google. (Although I do remember Orkut fondly. Too bad they killed it.)
posted by gakiko at 3:15 AM on August 26, 2021

Google’s solution is to ask me to pay them for additional storage. I have no faith that they’ll honor any commitment, so I’ll have to figure out some other solution

Google usually comes up with a reasonable transition eventually for stuff you're actually paying them money for, in my experience. The switch from Play Music to YouTube Music worked out fine for me, eventually. There was just a lot of unnecessary worry, but that could have been avoided by not reading articles about how the sky is falling because whatever. All my uploaded music and playlists came across, but there are a few tracks (not my uploads, mind, all 14,000 of those cans through fine) with rights issues that aren't playable any more. There are other versions of the songs that are playable in every instance I've checked, but I haven't bothered to fix up all my playlists yet.

Postini to Gmail was similarly fine. There are some things I miss, but it's still better than most of the alternatives for email filtering. But again, there was a long period of uncertainty before they got the kinks worked out just prior to the forced migration.
posted by wierdo at 4:06 AM on August 26, 2021

Google Talk (2005)
Google Voice (2009)
Google Wave (2009)
Google Buzz (2010)
Slide’s Disco (2011)
The Google+ Era (2011)
Google+ Hangouts video chat
Google+ Huddle/Messenger
Google Docs Editor Chat (2013)
Google Hangouts (2013)
Google Spaces (2016)
Google Allo (2016)
Google Duo (2016)
Google (Hangouts) Meet (2017)
YouTube Messages (2017)
Google (Hangouts) Chat (2018)
Google Maps Messages (2018)
Google & RCS (2019)
Google Photos Messages (2019)
Google Stadia Messages (2020)
Google Pay Messages (2021)
Google Assistant Messages (2021)
Google Phone Messaging (2021)
Google Chat, Part 2 (2021)

If you keep in mind that for the last couple of decades, Google could select the smartest, ablest software engineers and designers to come work for them, spending incredible resources on finding exactly the people they desired, then this absurdly long list of abject failures is nearly proof that meritocracy is nonsense.
posted by Kattullus at 5:30 AM on August 26, 2021 [17 favorites]

Well, they could select exactly whom they desired until about 2010 when Bookface started poaching their employees en masse.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:10 AM on August 26, 2021

Unfortunately, every new product ultimately disappoints Google because it isn't remotely as profitable as their advertising business. That doesn't stop them, though, because they're so rich that they can always discard their work and try again.

This isn’t what’s happening. The reason they start and stop products so much is that they’re trying to make something good enough to prevent a competitor from succeeding and give a competitor another avenue to into places to place/sell ads. They’re determined not to let something like Facebook happen ever again. So it’s start products to take the wind out sails and once it all dies down kill it and move on.
posted by jmauro at 7:28 AM on August 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

It isn't, but it seems like Gmail is their only product they haven't axed. Of course, that's probably because it's a datamining motherlode.
posted by tommasz at 7:36 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also because email keeps chugging along as the precursor to 'social engagement' online.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:50 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

It isn't, but it seems like Gmail is their only product they haven't axed. Of course, that's probably because it's a datamining motherlode.

Gmail and Search. Because they know if they end those programs it's game over for Google as all their customers will leave and they won't come back.
posted by jmauro at 9:11 AM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Customers as in 'if you're not paying for online data services, you're the product, not the customer'.
posted by k3ninho at 9:15 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

>Back in the late 90's my public sector IT co-worker and I mocked up wireframes and architecture diagrams of a new email "concept" intended to address various records management challenges with traditional email. Instead of an email server sending multiple copies of messages that could get forwarded to others, our idea was that there would be one message-object that the sender/owner could add/revoke access to. Recipient/participants would be able to add comments (instead of "replying") and could be delegated to add others as opposed to "forwarding." The beauty was there'd only ever be one object to archive, retrieve, disclose, etc. Nothing ever happened because it turns out we sucked at pitching, weren't engineers, and no one understood why this was "better" than email. Ten years later when I heard about Google Wave I thought "OMG! This is what we we trying to do!" Then I saw a demo...

I still want something like this that I can arrange as some sort of breadcrumb trail through my history like a scrapbook.

I want snapshots of change over time, and community commenting about about each item (themselves with tiers of privileged/unprivileged viewing as breadcrumb/scrapbooked objects).

Moderation and reputation management are expensive problems and so I also want ordinary users to put time into setting people onto the appropriate ways to behave in civilised communities, and the permissions setup to allow muting and to allow total dissociation of groups (where needed to provide a safe space to protect one from another).

Anyone know if this place exists yet? And if it does, should I even try to go there and risk ruining it?
posted by k3ninho at 9:22 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

to prevent a competitor from succeeding and give a competitor another avenue

"Fire & Motion" - Joel Spolsky

Everything I have heard/read about Google's internal culture, seems to indicate that it is/was nearly identical to Microsoft's culture in the 90's/00's. Crazy hiring practices, insane promotion metrics, PM's with territorial fiefdoms - and a "throw as many things against the wall and see what sticks" attitude towards duplicated product development efforts. Basically, you could have multiple teams working on the same functionality - but... "first-to-ship" won...
posted by rozcakj at 10:39 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

A lot of those anti-patterns aren't really unique to Google but happen in a lot big companies. I once worked on a project at IBM that we weren't allowed to talk about because the PM was afraid that another PM would get wind of it and try to sabotage it.
posted by octothorpe at 11:14 AM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

If I visit https://chat.google.com/ on my Android phone, I get a page telling me how to download the Chat app. But if I visit https://talk.google.com/ in the same browser I'm taken to the Google Play page for the old Hangouts app. I'm completely unsurprised by this level of inconsistency from Google — I mean, I had a hunch that I should check those 2 URLs and I was right.
posted by Tehhund at 12:30 PM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

This was a great article. Two things:

1) I didn't realize google voice was some sort of dying orphan. I use google voice regularly? How else do you call your mechanic or your kid's school or a hotel when you're in two different countries?

2) How jarring and weird, in a good way, it is to see screenshots of UIs from 5, 10, 20 years ago. I'm sure other people's memories work differently, but when I imagine gmail when I first got it in 2004 (thanks for the invite, Monica! I haven't seen you since 2008!) I can't help imagining it looking the way it does today. Like my precious metafilter, actually. But it really doesn't.
posted by sy at 12:32 PM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

How else do you call your mechanic or your kid's school or a hotel when you're in two different countries?

Whatsapp.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:39 PM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think RCS messaging is finally in a place where it's feature parity with Apple with the one extra enormous feature of being an open ecosystem

Uh, and with the one extra enormous non-feature of being insecure by design. Plus, they're a solid 10 years late to the party.

Seriously—Google should be embarrassed about proposing a text communications system in 2021 that's not end-to-end encrypted and has all the centralized, carrier-based architecture that RCS does.

And I have to imagine that Sundar Pichai (by all accounts a bright guy) dies a little bit inside, each time he has to come up with a new excuse why RCS isn't quiiiiite there yet. The problem this last time was, as usual, the massive number of stakeholders involved: "RCS is where we are like United Nations. We try to herd a bunch of people. [...] Android is open as part of the open platform stack. I think you need an open standard messaging framework. And we have to evolve that from its SMS days, and that’s RCS for me."

Except, why do I, as a user, give a shit about whether my messaging service is an "open standard messaging framework" or whether it lives above or below the TCP/IP stack? Google has invested this ridiculous amount of effort into RCS, because RCS is the successor to GSM. But being the successor to GSM isn't worth anything anymore. "Over the top" chat apps won, and nothing of value was lost. Except maybe to the cellular carriers, desperate to maintain some sort of uninvited "value add" between customers and services.

Users can just as easily type a phone number into Whatsapp or Signal as they can into their RCS app; the only advantage one might have over the other is how many people use it. And I don't see how RCS suddenly becomes the new standard when most people have basically settled on an better alternative already. (Unless they are depending on carriers and legacy telcos in places with unimpressive human-rights histories, who might leave RCS unblocked while blocking other application-level traffic.)

RCS solves a problem that the rest of the world solved and moved on from almost a decade ago, when we decided "messaging" was just another kind of IP traffic. And Google was part of that solution, until they decided to keep shooting themselves in the foot.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:09 PM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Google's voice recognition AI would (attempt to) transcribe your voicemail into easily scannable text. In the early days, it wasn't super accurate, but Voicemail transcription was still better than the black box of a play button. There was usually enough wonky text information to figure out if the voicemail was important or not.

This was my experience — the transcriptions started out hilariously bad but usually good enough that I could tell whether or not I needed to actually listen to the message. These days it's also useful for filtering spam: any voicemail of 4 seconds or less with no transcription can be ignored.

I signed up for Google Voice about a year after it launched and have used it as my primary number ever since. I tried to get a number that spelled my name or other words meaningful to me. After an hour of trying I got frustrated and entered the digits that spell "butt". And that's how my number for the past 11 years has been only slightly more mature than 1-800-BUTT-LOL.
posted by Tehhund at 6:09 PM on August 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

This conversation about chat doesn't mention 'Conway's Law' for 'the computer systems an organisation makes reflect their internal communication pathways'. It seems clear that the things that make money exist for billing advertisers and arranging places to put adverts. We're looking at the wrong end of this organisation wherein the end-user experience that suffers from a need to do things that attract eyeballs. (You could make the argument that a solid offering provides consistent data about what users do to make reliable predictions for converting adverts to sales, but any of the following apply: reliable-enough predictions exist, the data can be transformed so as to provide predictions and/or the reward structures at Google aren't overcoming the fights for territory and fiefdom.)
posted by k3ninho at 7:12 AM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Google has ruined a lot of things, but Android still seems largely okay. Gmail is suffering greatly from corporate attempts to improve something that was already almost perfect though, and Search, their core product, is drowning in storefront hits and SEO. I saw someone on Twitter a couple of days ago speculate that what we need is essentially the return of a classic-Yahoo-style link directory, which is an interesting place to be in this year of our frog 2021.
posted by JHarris at 2:09 PM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

(Hey look at that, I made a comment in a Google thread and I didn't mention Reader! oh damn)
posted by JHarris at 2:10 PM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oh, and our D&D group used to use Hangouts to play, but then we were forcibly switched to Meet, and now the others tell me that their video chats are being ended after an hour, so we've moved to Discord. Congrats Google, you fucked it up again!
posted by JHarris at 2:12 PM on August 27, 2021 [5 favorites]

and now the others tell me that their video chats are being ended after an hour

I've been doing weekly family chats with Google and run into the same problem. The solution is very simple: You just schedule multiple 1-hour meetings in a row. Everybody leaves the first meeting and joins the second meeting, takes about 10 seconds. I'm not sure what the point is of the restriction.
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 PM on August 27, 2021

Neither am I, but I know it would very difficult to get my friends to come back to Google Meet now. My voice kept dropping out when connected via Android anyway, but now their stupid restriction destroyed my friends' will to put up with Google Meet, and it would probably require Discord messing up similarly for them to even consider coming back.
posted by JHarris at 6:49 PM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Not a Google thing, but sort of related: I'd been using Dropbox for years. A free (expanded, with referrals) personal account, and a paid work account. Then, sometime last year or so, Dropbox suddenly and drastically reduced the number of devices you could use with a free account. The seamless file-sharing I'd had across my various desktops, laptops, and mobile devices suddenly broke in the course of an update. Dropbox suggested I could fix this by upgrading to a paid account (to restore the functionality they just took away), but all that this behavior did was convince me that Dropbox could not be trusted, so I canceled my other paid account and stopped using Dropbox altogether.

Google (especially with Reader) feels much the same way. Some of their apps are neat, but I do not trust them with anything important at all, and I work on the assumption that anything I have stored and any service I am using can (and, given their track record, probably will) go away quite suddenly.
posted by xedrik at 1:25 PM on August 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

we've moved to Discord

I think Discord is the only credible service that allows unlimited free for group voice chat.

They've entirely captured the RPG community as far as I can tell in the past 2-3 years. The pandemic solidified that choice into a monopoly for that community. We use them 2,3 times a week.
posted by bonehead at 6:14 AM on August 31, 2021 [3 favorites]