- Updates
- 2022-06-08: latest messaging services killed by Google
- 2023-11-10: Updated list from this Mastodon message based on arstechnica
Google has quite of a story when it comes to services and apps for messaging:
- 2005: Google Talk (a.k.a. Google Chat)
- 2009: Google Voice
- 2009: Google Wave
- 2010: Google Buzz
- 2011: Google+ Messenger
- 2013: Google Hangouts
- 2016: Google Spaces
- 2016: Google Allo
- 2017: Google Hangouts Chat
- 2018: Messages/RCS
- 2020: some new stuff that doesn't have a name yet
Somebody could say that this is what you get when people get promoted when they "ship something to the customer" totally neglecting whether or not this "something" has meaning, value or other positive aspects. This is a general cultural issue of the Silicon Valley.
Google was on the right track in my opinion when they worked on Google Wave. It was planned as a federated open protocol with open source code published. This way, each company, organization or community was able to set up their own instance that talked to all other instances. Just like the email infrastructure.
For the first time, I thought that this had the potential to replace business email services in the long run. The technology involved was awesome and highly collaborative work was extremely well supported. In this direction, I've never seen anything better ever since.
Then Google discontinued the development out of the blue and moved the code to the Apache Foundation. It entered a slow but steady death road until it was finally declared dead in 2018.
There are no specific descriptions on the new stuff Google is going to release. My prediction is that this is going to be either dead on arrival or a bit later or it is going to be a niche product for some time.
Considering the market power of Google, the whole story is a declaration of failure.
2022-06-08: The German heise news features a nice article on the latest sundowns of Google message services which is fun to read. The list can now be extended by:
- 2016: Google Duo (replaced by Google Meet in 2022)
- 2017: Hangouts Meet → Google Meet
- 2020: Hangouts Chat → Google Chat
- 2020: Spaces (no, that's not "Google Spaces" from above)
- 2022: "Google Meet" → "Google Duo" → "Google Meet" (feature migration and renaming)
If anybody is telling me about a brand new chat service by Google, I'll just laugh hysterically while going away.
2023-11-10: Yet another bunch of message services from this Mastodon message based on arstechnica:
- 2011: Google Disco
- 2013: Google Docs Editor Chat
- 2017: YouTube Messages
- 2018: Google Maps Messages
- 2019: Google Photos Messages
- 2020: Google Stadia Messages
- 2021: Google Pay Messages
- 2021: Google Assistant Messages
- 2021: Google Phone Messaging