Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

True or not, Google clearly needed yet another messaging service, which they in about a year's time would have messed up and deprecated.

How about they just unify what they already have on offer, and get it working properly (and maybe worldwide this time!) before messing with yet another service?

sigh

View on HN

True or not, Google clearly needed yet another messaging service, which they in about a year's time would have messed up and deprecated.

Exactly. It's almost been a year since Allo was released, which means we are due for an announcement of a new messaging app from Google. Likely something that combines Allo and Duo into a single app, and call it something like Trio.

Of course, when they inevitably split "Trio" into separate apps a year after release, they won't be able to stick with the same name convention.

OnePointFiveio A - For text

OnePointFiveio B - For video

Forget Duo and Allo, they are still splitting and combining Google Hangouts! I remember when they combined SMS into Google Hangouts it was game changer for me but just recently I got notified that they are splitting out SMS functionality out of Google Hangouts...

I think Google's fragmented approach to messaging is hilarious but what's the harm in approaching messaging from different angles and apps? Why not keep at it as startups would, but throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks?

I think the biggest problem are discovery and execution. Take the basic problem: How do I know which of my contacts I can contact where?

Google already had a unified account system, which covers a huge portion of the internet-using world: Google-accounts. It would be perfect for discovery and tying things together neatly with what they already have to offer.

If a contact your are chatting with in "Hangouts" (formerly Google talk and before that gchat?) also was using Duo on his phone... Google could show an icon for Due and offer a video-call to this person. If both systems used the same ID.

Instead they chose to create entirely new login systems and identities for their new IM systems. This needless fragmentation means I don't know which of my contacts are available on which of the many google-provided IM-services.

Some small changes here could really have significantly lowered the pain involved, and made all these different apps tie together in a way which would have been useful.

Now we just have a mess, getting worse every year, and I now refuse to use any of them for it.

Because this is honestly a really hard problem. There honestly just not really a good way of combining accounts without lots of manual effort on the part of the user. Users also largely don't want this. When Google combined Gmail and Youtube accounts it was just a god awful clusterfuck that required a lot of manual intervention for each user to get their stuff back in order. It also was a net negative because people didn't want their email/google+ tied to their anonymous youtube accounts.

Well I think there was no need to have separate accounts to begin with. YouTube and Gmail had different accounts because YouTube was a separate company.

I work for Google but opinions are my own.

I think having the option for separate accounts would have been best.

I try not to post anything on Youtube or favourite videos or anything because it's tied to my "real" Google identity which is very traceable to me.

For the same reason I try not to link my Facebook or Google accounts to games and stuff I can help it (though I've mostly given up).

I did have a "fake" Facebook account for lots of stuff that wanted access to my Facebook feed and it's craptacular. Same for Google, but switching accounts for Youtube is a hassle,

> I think having the option for separate accounts would have been best.

That's very contextual IMO.

Having the same handle across various private communication tools provided by the same company makes sense.

Forcing you to use your real identity when making public comments traceable across the internet is something completely different.

Forcing Youtubers to use real identities was bad. For these IM services, creating new accounts was bad.

Because eventually consumers will start to distrust Google (in the sense that their products won't last). Even in this throw-away society we have today, people don't want that much churn with messaging.

They never put enough effort behind anything to get it to stick. And you can only do that so many times before people are just not interested in what you have to offer because, no matter how good it might be, they're thinking that you're just going to move onto the next thing in a year or so.

Because that conflicts with the goals of the "let's see if we can paint the walls with Teflon" division.

Because when you are Google and you depreciate Google Talk for Google Hangouts and add steps to connecting with people you push users like me who don't want to deal with the extras steps toward using Facebook and iMessage for my messaging needs.

The harm is that I, a user, doesn't want to download any google messaging apps, because their usable life is low.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com