2y ago

Google reminds us that Google Chat can be used with friends and family

9to5google.com Google reminds us that Google Chat can be used with friends and family

While Messages and RCS is how Google wants you to message friends, Google Chat also fits that role and the company today reminded us...

tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo's) successor, google chat.

Android @lemdro.id

ijeff @lemdro.id

2y ago

Google reminds us that Google Chat can be used with friends and family

9to5google.com /2023/06/30/google-chat-friends/

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62 comments

google's messaging strategy has gotten so bad that they now have to remind consumers which of the apps are made for them. i myself had no clue that the google chat app in the play store was targeted towards consumers, i just assumed that the app was google workspaces only considering they always push rcs & that the play store description doesn't go two sentences without talking about enterprise & google workspaces.
it's kinda wild when you consider that they had a 17 year headstart on this & still somehow lost the messaging app/site race multiple times
- How long until they close down the Google Chat app and move to something else that is barely different?
  
  This is Google's biggest problem, I think. They're so flaky on their products and services, I find myself not wanting to bother trying things out in case they don't become popular enough for Google to maintain. I saw a lot of the same remarks about Stadia, and though I seem to remember Google assuring Stadia was playing the long game, well, we see how that played out.
  
  probably about a week, give or take
- I enjoyed using Hangouts. I still do. But the plethora of communication apps Google makes always give me chills that the judgement day is just round the corner. And by the time it arrives, it will just end up as another name on the list without much resort.
  
  same, back ~2015-2018 i was hangouts' biggest fan. now i avoid most google platforms in general aside from gmail, android & youtube. i can't trust anything else to stay around anymore, & even when they do keep an app alive they end up just endlessly shuffling them around like this for no reason
  
  I was an early Fi subscriber, and Hangouts was awesome in the beginning as it would handle GTalk and SMS seamlessly.
  Signal is my new friend.
- It's pretty hilarious how badly they've fucked this up. I have no interest in Google Chat at all because it's almost certain they'll replace it with yet another service before I even have a chance to settle in.

- Seriously. I'm quite a Google maximalist (yea, I know, spare me) and a ~~young-ish~~ not-that-old IT nerd. But even I have lost track of which chat app is currently the supported one / the successor of all the dead ones, and how to get is / use it (well, particularly on the web). If I'm confused, I can't imagine how it is for the average internet user or old people.
  
  Even Google Chat is trash. It can't beat Signal.

Killing hangouts just made me use other platforms and throw Google in the bin.
When they keep killing stuff I use, I get burnt.
- Yep, at this point I'm expecting that Gmail too is going to be discontinued without warning
  
  Me, an Inbox by Gmail fan: first time?
  
  Better start preparing...
- Yeah, I hit a point around 2018 where I went from being a huge fan of Google’s to switching to iOS and trying to degoogle my life as much as possible (but also not wholly relying on one company for anything. I still have Google photos, but I also have local backups of all my photos, plus they’re in OneDrive and iCloud for example)

Please use Signal. It is a great alternative!
- Signal is great. But it's so hard to convince anyone in my family to use it as almost everyone here (in Finland) uses whatsapp to communicate.
  But I have few groups in signal with my IT-related friends.
- Surprisingly it's been really easy to get people on signal, haven't had to really try convincing people at all just explain what it is and they get it
  
  still can't get my friends and family on it, have to use messenger which is quite the pain lol
- Got my immediate family on it. Miss some features when forced elsewhere.

Huh? They confused 1st of July with 1st of April?
Another chat app???????
They don't get tired announcing and killing all of those chat apps????
Who's going to bother inviting friends to chat in a platform that will be killed in one year max????
- All of my friend group was on hangouts. I don't think Google realizes how monumentally stupid it was to kill off hangouts. Discord was really picking up in popularity and when hangouts died I moved the last of friend group to Discord.
  Why in the fuck would I move them off discord back to Google?

I used GTalk with the family.
Then you killed it.
- (GTalk not the family)
  
  thanks for clarifying
  
  I was a little worried for a moment

Google’s promotion-pack culture strikes again. You don’t get promoted at Google for “maintaining a successful product and keeping people happy.” You do get promoted for launching a new product, even if it competes with another well-liked Google product.
So if you want to be successful at Google, you launch a new chat service.
- Damn that is such a stupid way of doing things too. Eventually user goodwill depletes and you're left with a significant investment in products that don't even generate profit or good.

The article says
Just to recap: Google Talk (gchat) > Google Hangouts > Hangouts Chat > Google Chat
but of course that's only part of the story. Here's a longer recap from 2021.

…nope, can’t use it to chat with my friends and family, we all gave up on Teh Goog and I worked there for over a decade! 😆
(also, by the time you see this, they may have renamed it or introduced a competing messaging app. or both.)
- And the new one they introduced will have fewer features than the old one with no plans to get it to feature parity.

Why is it written with collectivist speak? "..reminds us..? Who is the "us"? The collectivist phrasing is disturbing as opposed to using objective terms.
- "Us" the audience. It's just a turn of phrase that headline writers use - nothing deep
  
  And the website is specifically for followers of Google news.

"We promise we wont kill this one!"
- This trend is bad for the Google brand, and I'm surprised that the higher ups there don't understand it. Why should I use a Google service and get attached to it if they are going to unexpectedly remove it entirely?
  How long until Google Earth gets the axe? Or even Gmail? I'm writing this on my Google Pixel, but they could theoretically just say "naw we wanna leave the phone market" and then may not make the phone any longer or not provide OS or security updates if that is their prerogative.
  For such a large tech company, they have the resources to run these services at cost in order to have their users be more valuable to them in the long term.
  I'm still bitter about them completely dismantling the original Google Talk desktop application two decades ago (yes they weren't shortened to app then lol) as it was the best communication platform of its time and had very clear voice comms.
- I have a hard time trying new google stuff because it seems they kill it a few years later. Google used to be amazing, now I’m highly skeptical of the company. I’ve even switched to using Bing because google searches just result in a bunch of AI shit and other SEO bullshit.

No thanks goolag

Let's all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

I gave up once Wave was killed. It was the best of them.

Matrix
- I used to use Google hangouts since it worked with Pidgin and other 3rd party apps. As soon as they nuked Hangouts I spun up a Matrix instance, got all my family on it, and haven't looked back. It's been excellent.

I wrote about this last year because google keeps wanting to blame others for its own messaging failures.

My D&D group uses it for planning. It's basically the only context where I use it. It's suitable to the task, but doesn't really have any distinguishing features.

All i ask Google is for them to let users install Gmail Go on all devices.

It's impossible to keep up with Google's various services. Unless it's Gmail or Photos, it'll probably get killed within a year.
- Photos already took place of another application killed by Google. It can be killed again.

I always used to use allo and hangouts when I was a flight attendant as they would still send messages despite the airlines paywall for the internet on their wifi. no idea how it worked but was awesome little gimmic

I remember I actually used Allo, and Hangouts
Seriously google WTF
- I don't think I ever even heard of Allo until the news articles started coming out about Google killing it off. I used Hangouts briefly, but I didn't know a lot of people who used it. I am surprised they are trying chat again.

I always used to use Hangouts as my default chat app for friends. We had a big DnD group chat on it. But we migrated to WhatsApp when Google said they were going to kill hangouts and never looked back.
Why would I trust Google with my chats when they constantly abandon/kill off their best tools. We've now moved to Signal and I'm expecting to stay there for a long time.
- Google fairly successfully managed to kill that. It's gone from Internet standard to a niche thing with everyone doing their own thing now.
  
  I've seen a lot of buzz about XMPP lately (well, mostly in relation to P92 and corps killing FOSS projects). Beyond it being a comm protocol, I don't really know much about it. Is it still in use?

62 comments