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Most comments are critical about Google's way of doing things, but maybe this is a good moment for an eulogy. Is anyone using Google Talk right now or has good things to say about it? Was it a place where you happened to have meaningful conversation? (Not me, but sometimes I'm nostalgic about internet places that came and went...)

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It was fine. I talked to some people in there, I plugged it into Pidgin as I did those days, it was nice that I could talk to other people using my own domain and later moved to other providers without contacts noticing.

Because it was open I could use a generic interface to it, which was good for me as it let me shove it into the same app as MSN, YIM and AIM, but not so good for Google as it didn't make it particularly sticky, which I gather is why they shelved it for hangouts (though they did leave it's undead corpse shamble on)

It would be great just to get an explanation of how people were even using it. Most users were kicked off Google Talk around 2013. Apparently third party apps were somehow allowed to continue using it.

They weren't kicked off. It was just known to people that only used the web app as Hangouts.

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