A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps (2021)
9 comments
·January 13, 2025dlcarrier
ahartmetz
Hey, at least some Googlers got to present chat app #1 - #527 in their promotion packages. I really appreciate that as a customer.
softwaredoug
Honsestly reading this, it sounds like Google Talk was a wildly successful system that morphed into a backend for all kinds of weird things. And now we all use Hangouts/Meets which seems to be a pretty successful part of the GSuite system.
Google built a decent consumer chat that turned into an extension of Gmail. Hangouts was the rewrite that came in and took over Gmail chat and calls. Gmail, Docs, Meet eventually all became a successful enterprise product in the GSuite.
jpalawaga
The reality is Google's peak messaging days were 2016-2019. When you could send/receive text messages from your Gmail inbox alongside Google's native chat platform. Also, all of your chats were backed up and searchable by Gmail (which was actually good at the time).
Having RCS is nice, but I always said the deep integration of SMS into gmails platform was a big competitive advantage and was something that kept me firmly in the ecosystem for years.
Sent from my iPhone
gnabgib
Discussion at the time (144 points, 80 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727
DanAtC
okay, and?
airstrike
...and people might want to go and read that discussion, especially considering how this one still has very little activity despite being on the front page.
It's standard HN practice to link to previous big discussions for the same article and actually appreciated that people take the time to link to them.
notyourwork
The article is from 2021.
Over2Chars
"Slack (eight years old)"... really?
I mean I could be wrong but I was under the impression Slack was just IRC with a fancy web interface. And IRC goes back to 1988 is wikipedia is to be believed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
If I'm right that means Slack is much older, except for the fancy UI parts, which are no great improvement over say the nice colors of BitchX with some bots that record the channel history.
And you can't take over Slack channels by riding a server split. That would be super-cool though.
It was great when Google Talk would federate with any compatible chat service over XMPP. Nowadays, Google's different services don't even have compatible chat systems within themselves.