Moving Ahead

Another new update to Hang­outs, now you can broad­cast your hang­outs to peo­ple every­where. Cool. I don’t use hang­outs, but I think it is a cool fea­ture and will give it a try some­time. What I do use often is Google Talk. To be clear, I con­verse with very few peo­ple on Google Talk. The major­ity of the con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen on Face­book and What­sApp. I am an Ubuntu user and the Skype client Linux sucks, so no Skype for me.

I remem­ber dis­tinctly when GTalk was the main IM client for most. Yahoo Mes­sen­ger, its main com­peti­tor, was big and bloated. Like most things Google at that time, GTalk and its GMail plu­gin were fast, clean and reliable.

Some­how, Google just lost love for GTalk. The Win­dows client did not get any update and the ser­vice became slow, buggy and unre­li­able. On my Android phone, the Talk client loses mes­sages in between. The GMail Talk plu­gin keeps play­ing its own game of  dis­con­nected — con­nect­ing — yeah, we are back — dis­con­nected. To my knowl­edge, there isn’t any good iPad app for GTalk. Com­pare that to the omnipresent What­sApp, and the ever improv­ing Face­book Mes­sen­ger, and you will won­der why is Google not inter­ested in Talk.

To my naive mind ear­lier, the rea­son for Google’s lack of inter­est was that per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions are not a big enough mar­ket. But, Apple’s launch of Face­time and iMes­sage, Microsoft’s acqui­si­tion of Skype, Facebook’s res­olute efforts on Mes­sen­ger, Samsung’s Cha­tOn etc have proved that my naive assump­tion was entirely incorrect.

Hang­outs are one of the few/only inter­est­ing thing about Google+  right now. Instead  of build­ing this we-will-kill Face­book prod­uct, what if Google had iter­ated on Talk and become the dom­i­nant online con­ver­sa­tion tool.

I will update the post if I find any rea­son behind what happened.

Photo: flickr/hippydream