• takeda@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    GTalk was easy to install, no need to create an account (most already had Gmail), had incompatible features (like making a voice call), later was integrated into the Gmail web interface, so you could use it anywhere. So many Jabber users did switch to it.

    Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving. Since most Jabber users had Gmail account many switches to continue talking to their peers. Stubborn people, like me, were left with rooster full of people online that none responded to you.

    At that time Google was seemed like a white knight, fixing things and making them better.

    Facebook today is known for being extremely shitty and destroying any competition, and there are still so many naive people.

    • Zak@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving.

      Google intentionally turned off XMPP federation in its chat product.

      I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I guess I was lucky enough to avoid spam, but I believe you.

        As for them doing it unintentionally, I dunno… They did very similar thing to Usenet as well (although in that case spam had a major part.

        I think Google’s way of operating is to try new things and see what sticks. Once it gets popular figure out if it can generate revenue and if it doesn’t, quickly shut it down.

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I said it was added to Gmail later.

        Gmail went public on February 7, 2007, the last release of GTalk was May 14, 2013. Anyway by the time GMail went public, everyone and their dog had a Gmail invite.