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GeekNights Monday - Instant Messaging in 2016

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  • Rym said:

    All of these "why didn't you mention specific platform x" questions prove our point about fracturing of the landscape.

    Yeah, this episode was just nonsense to me! You were saying all kind of things like "Well of course anyone clever would just set up a Google Hangout."

    I have never once used a Google Hangout, nor been invited to one, nor know enough about it to know what situation to use it. Beluga? Never heard of it, and it seemed the obvious choice for you for convention chatting. I've heard a lot about Slack, but haven't ever thought to try it, nor have been invited.

    Also because I use a an iPhone and a MacBook, I can chat to anyone from either device. Even my iPad. All SMS messages make it through to all my devices, as well as (at least) notifications from other chat services. So don't live in a world where I have to worry about the split of mobile and desktop.
    You would if you had a friend that didn't use iMessage or SMS. But apparently you don't. Lucky you.
  • They are on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and I either can chat on my MacBook using that system or get notifications about a new message onto my MacBook, and then use the phone app.
  • RymRym
    edited December 2016
    My biggest problem lately is knowing which service to use to contact certain people. Everyone (essentially) has a gmail account, so google hangout is guaranteed to work for them. But if they don't use it as their primary IM service, it's not set up on their phone or with notifications, so they don't see the message until they happen to check their email on a desktop.

    So I know the person has hangouts, but I have to look at my own history to see if they respond in a timely fashion. If they don't, I have to check the other services I use. I end up defaulting with these people to an SMS just because I have no knowledge of a reliable way to get to them without bookkeeping. Worse, they don't really think about IM at all, so even if I ask them what they use, the answer is "whatever."

    The people who say "whatever" are the same people who get annoyed if YOU don't respond to THEM in a timely fashion, or if you send a message to the "wrong" service for them.

    Why didn't you send me a telegram?!
    You never told me you use telegram. What should I use to message you?
    Telegram.

    -weeks pass-

    Why didn't you invite me to the party?!
    I sent you a telegram.
    Oh, I don't check telegram. Just snapchat me. Or SMS I guess. Whatever: just not telegram.

    -weeks pass-

    You guys didn't show up at the bar.
    I SMSd you: we went to a different place.
    Why'd you SMS me? I don't ha-
    -murder-

    Post edited by Rym on
  • Rym said:

    All of these "why didn't you mention specific platform x" questions prove our point about fracturing of the landscape.

    Yup. And your anecdote about WhatsApp dominating LATAM and Europe. Go to Asia next, and then prepare to embrace Line (which has been trying its hardest to get a foothold in North America).

    I still side with Luke though that WhatsApp and its ilk become very popular well before your 2014-era people started pestering you.

    The other interesting wrinkle to how these second-tier messaging services came into popularity is their use of emoji/stickers. Yeah, Hangouts has all of that stuff now. But the messaging services were more out in front. It astonishes me that people would actually switch to a different service just for that sort of thing.

    Take Snapchat. It's core user base didn't come from a desire to have non-recorded messages. The top 2 reasons people embraced Snapchat were 1) because the UI is such garbage that parents can't figure out how to use it, and can't find their kid's accounts, and 2) because they have "lenses" which bring filters and emoji into video messaging. As the app blew up in popularity, they pulled back on point 1, making it somewhat easier to use/discover people, but they already had their user base established.

  • Matt said:

    Rym said:

    All of these "why didn't you mention specific platform x" questions prove our point about fracturing of the landscape.

    Yup. And your anecdote about WhatsApp dominating LATAM and Europe. Go to Asia next, and then prepare to embrace Line (which has been trying its hardest to get a foothold in North America).

    I still side with Luke though that WhatsApp and its ilk become very popular well before your 2014-era people started pestering you.

    The other interesting wrinkle to how these second-tier messaging services came into popularity is their use of emoji/stickers. Yeah, Hangouts has all of that stuff now. But the messaging services were more out in front. It astonishes me that people would actually switch to a different service just for that sort of thing.

    Take Snapchat. It's core user base didn't come from a desire to have non-recorded messages. The top 2 reasons people embraced Snapchat were 1) because the UI is such garbage that parents can't figure out how to use it, and can't find their kid's accounts, and 2) because they have "lenses" which bring filters and emoji into video messaging. As the app blew up in popularity, they pulled back on point 1, making it somewhat easier to use/discover people, but they already had their user base established.

    I know Line is pretty big, but I thought Kakao Talk was the king in Asia? It was also the one that really dominated with the emoji/stickers. It has its own trademarked characters that are very famous.
  • I found it funny how you guys were so livid about the idea of people using Steam chat as a primary messenger source. It's one of the ways me and my best friend chat fairly often. He refuses to use Facebook, and we've never used Google Hangouts. It's always SMS or Steam chat with him. Which is frustrating not because Steam chat, but because the Pathfinder group we're a part of is then forced to jump between Facebook Messenger and SMS, since he's the only one not using Messenger. He's also the only one out of town as well, so...Yeah. That whole situation is complicated anyways.
  • Axel said:

    I found it funny how you guys were so livid about the idea of people using Steam chat as a primary messenger source. It's one of the ways me and my best friend chat fairly often. He refuses to use Facebook, and we've never used Google Hangouts. It's always SMS or Steam chat with him. Which is frustrating not because Steam chat, but because the Pathfinder group we're a part of is then forced to jump between Facebook Messenger and SMS, since he's the only one not using Messenger. He's also the only one out of town as well, so...Yeah. That whole situation is complicated anyways.

    This is why I rarely let others dictate what chat method will be used. I force people to use hangouts or SMS/iMessage.
  • Yup, that you did a whole show on messaging, even touching on how they make money and business models, and didn't touch on Line, sticker packs, and application install ads means you don't really know what you are talking about.

    Fragmentation is a problem, but it isn't a major problem for most people. You know what else isn't a problem for most people? Anything to do with chat on a desktop computer. Nobody gives a shit.

    But the current situation solves many problems for people is ways which were impossible in 1996, when you think interoperability was best. Easy messaging on the go is the most important thing for the wider world. Also not paying 10 cents per message.

    ANY break in interoperability is worth it for mobile messaging with no costs using apps that are designed for normal people, not computer experts.
  • Most of these services are monetized by:

    1. They're not: they're intended to drive monetization of other related services
    2. They're not: VC money keeps them going
    3. Ads or direct branding
    4. Monetizing your data
    5. (rarely) Direct payment

    The big shift was when VC money helped stand up platforms that could run unmonetized long enough to build a user base coupled with the explosion of cheap smartphone/tablet access.
  • Yup, that you did a whole show on messaging, even touching on how they make money and business models, and didn't touch on Line, sticker packs, and application install ads means you don't really know what you are talking about.

    Fragmentation is a problem, but it isn't a major problem for most people. You know what else isn't a problem for most people? Anything to do with chat on a desktop computer. Nobody gives a shit.

    But the current situation solves many problems for people is ways which were impossible in 1996, when you think interoperability was best. Easy messaging on the go is the most important thing for the wider world. Also not paying 10 cents per message.

    ANY break in interoperability is worth it for mobile messaging with no costs using apps that are designed for normal people, not computer experts.

    Normal people could use the old AIM just fine. Usability has never been a problem. Mobile use has also never been a problem. AIM mobile apps before there were even iPhones, as did others. BlackBerry Messenger was even a thing in those days! No matter how simple the apps, are interoperability is the real problem. Congratulations you made a nice app like Line or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but now you have 10 of them on your phone, and you can't remember which one to use to talk to which people.
  • RymRym
    edited December 2016
    I get the impression most people just don't worry about it. The side effect is not everyone in their social circle will get immediate notification of messages. But that's only really needed for real time coordination (e.g., meeting up somewhere for an event or something). They just fumble through whatever messaging they need to at the time ad hoc.

    Few people have our use cases of regular, established group chats and expecting immediate notification for all messages. We're the oddball niche users: not them.

    Look at the snapchat kids. They WANT there to be no archive (let's ignore the fact that they don't realize how threadbare that assurance is). They WANT less functionality: their use case is specifically ephemeral. Regular people are terrified of someone having a searchable archive of everything they ever said.

    The fascinating thing is really the loss of established universal messaging addresses. In 2016, we have two that truly (effectively) federate, are fully interoperable, and easily migrated: email and actual phone numbers. They're the only general persistent ones.

    Yet, most people I know don't actually get notifications for emails on their mobile devices... Or, they do, but their email inboxes are a garbage nightmare mess of a million unread ones so they never respond or actually see emails.
    Post edited by Rym on
  • Rym said:

    Yet, most people I know don't actually get notifications for emails on their mobile devices... Or, they do, but their email inboxes are a garbage nightmare mess of a million unread ones so they never respond or actually see emails.

    Or they do, but they ignore them because they have 10000+ unread emails. Whereas my home screen has no red dots on it whatsoever.
  • Oh, so when I came home yesterday, I had two messages for me in Steam, one in Battle.net, and one INSIDE Giant Multiplayer Robot,
  • On the removal of features from Hangouts and the onset of Allo: This most likely was not an internal SNAFU from Google, but rather part of their massive AI push. Allo's personal assistant is its main big feature that google wants to push at the moment (one of the cornerstones of the pixel and the google home). The integration of the google assistant is incredibly tight with Allo, as every message you send is analyzed to improve Google's AI model of your behavior, which they will then most likely use to monetize your use of the application. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but this is a push Google is making across all of its platforms, and it has clearly been influencing their product offerings.

    Now for a more jovial point, given the alphabet of all valid HTML characters, Η, and a subset of that language therein Θ that contains all valid HTML, the sequence:
    Θ * (<body> )j Θ * ( </body>)j Θ *
    Which, by the pumping lemma for regular languages, is not regular. So, there exists a subset of valid HTML that cannot be recognized by any FSA, and thus it cannot be parsed using regular expressions. Furthermore, this case is a good reason that regular expressions aren't even powerful enough to parse common HTML, as it is a special case of arbitrary amounts of nested HTML.
    Don't listen to everything you hear in the Patreon credit roll ;)
  • Fuck you Allo, I am never typing to an AI chatbot. I only use voice commands when I need to be hands-free as it is.

    The next thing you people are going to tell me is that people still call each other on the phone.
  • Rym said:

    Most of these services are monetized by:

    1. They're not: they're intended to drive monetization of other related services
    2. They're not: VC money keeps them going
    3. Ads or direct branding
    4. Monetizing your data
    5. (rarely) Direct payment

    You can't make a list like that and not include stickers!

    See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/13/chat-app-line-makes-over-270-million-a-year-from-selling-stickers/

    "Japanese mobile messaging app Line is banking more than $20 million per month selling sticker packs, which typically trade for $1-2 for sets of 12-18, according to data from the company."

    Why do you think that Apple updated Messages this year to include sticker packs?
  • Apreche said:

    Yup, that you did a whole show on messaging, even touching on how they make money and business models, and didn't touch on Line, sticker packs, and application install ads means you don't really know what you are talking about.

    Fragmentation is a problem, but it isn't a major problem for most people. You know what else isn't a problem for most people? Anything to do with chat on a desktop computer. Nobody gives a shit.

    But the current situation solves many problems for people is ways which were impossible in 1996, when you think interoperability was best. Easy messaging on the go is the most important thing for the wider world. Also not paying 10 cents per message.

    ANY break in interoperability is worth it for mobile messaging with no costs using apps that are designed for normal people, not computer experts.

    Normal people could use the old AIM just fine. Usability has never been a problem. Mobile use has also never been a problem. AIM mobile apps before there were even iPhones, as did others. BlackBerry Messenger was even a thing in those days! No matter how simple the apps, are interoperability is the real problem. Congratulations you made a nice app like Line or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but now you have 10 of them on your phone, and you can't remember which one to use to talk to which people.
    I had a normal mobile phone from 1999 until I bought my iPhone in 2010. In 11 years, how many apps did I ever install? Zero. None.

    How many times did I get IRC to work reliably and easily? Maybe two times out of dozens of attempts. I read newsgroups for about two years before ever working out how to post to them.

    You're computer geeks in your ivory tower, and don't understand how amazing it is that apps on smart phones just work.

    With so many ways to chat, interoperability is the mildest of mild problems compared to not having a way to chat at all.
  • Why not add that AI stuff to Hangouts?
  • You're right: I forgot about microtransactions. Sort of rolled them into direct payment, but they're really distinct as a business model.
  • The messaging companies are expanding in weird ways, too. Line opened up a webcomics division about 2 years ago (it's actually run by the guy who used to be my editor at MTV Geek). It's a standalone webcomic reader app that hosts ~200 original comics, on a daily release schedule.

    I am not sure where the monetization is in this because I never looked at it closely. Must be ads?
  • Matt said:

    The messaging companies are expanding in weird ways, too. Line opened up a webcomics division about 2 years ago (it's actually run by the guy who used to be my editor at MTV Geek). It's a standalone webcomic reader app that hosts ~200 original comics, on a daily release schedule.

    I am not sure where the monetization is in this because I never looked at it closely. Must be ads?

    This is why web companies are always doing things other than the business they started with. e.g: Why is Twitter streaming NFL football?

    http://www.rushkoff.com/tyee-next-economy-tech-capitalisms-impossible-dream/

    Webcomics are bigger than you think. They helped Naver become the Google of South Korea.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naver
  • Apreche said:

    Why not add that AI stuff to Hangouts?

    Most likely because it's difficult to add that large a feature into the ecosystem, and because they wanted to market a new product with the AI inclusion as one of the major selling points. Not to mention that the concept and most use cases of a digital assistant are very much oriented around mobile platforms, and not the PC.
    Also, adding that large and controversial (in many circles) of a feature to an existing platform as default opt-in, and where opt-out gives you a pretty large usability hit, is a really good way to fracture an already dissatisfied user-base.
  • Well, if Hangout dies we can all just pick something to switch to.
  • I've been using GroupMe, it runs of sms therefore runs off your phone number and therefore anyone can use it, even without downloading and installing it (only one person has to). I wish I'd known about hangouts sooner though as getting group me onto my computer is a pain and I don't wanna so I just accept that I'm only available on there when I have my phone on me and at no other time.
  • The one saving grace of Facebook messenger is the ability to just find and chat with people that I sort of know if i ever need to get in touch with them. Doesn't happen very often. More often than not people try to set up these group chats on Facebook messenger too so I end up with a lot of nonsense on there.

    But beyond that everything is always drastically fragmented. Generally I can still use SMS/iMessage with most people but one dude I talk with frequently who I used to work with would only use Facebook messenger I think because his mobile plan is fucking garbage or something. Then another friend only wants to ever chat over gchat, and yet a third over skype. And skype is clearly the worst. Riddled with ads. Literally slows down the ui thread as it fetches new ads. He wants to use it because his work uses skype for business so he thinks it's easier to just have one chat up so it looks like he's doing work or some shit.

    The fucking worst is Skype of Business. Or Lync as it was known in a previous life. That thing is borderline nonsensical with most of its features. My company now was using that when I first started and I managed to turn the tide and use slack instead. Although there are a few holdover people who are paranoid about security they refuse to use it for some idiotic reason.
  • "Japanese mobile messaging app Line is banking more than $20 million per month selling sticker packs, which typically trade for $1-2 for sets of 12-18, according to data from the company."

    I've never used Line, and I only know two things about it - They sell stickers(and some of them are pretty good, like the Re-Life sets), and it says "Line!" in the most adorable voice when you get a message.

  • Viber is also HUGE into stickers and people pay out the ass for jpegs.
  • Alaric728 said:

    given the alphabet of all valid HTML characters, Η, and a subset of that language therein Θ that contains all valid HTML, the sequence:
    Θ * (<body> )j Θ * ( </body>)j Θ *
    Which, by the pumping lemma for regular languages, is not regular.

    I don't think the pumping lemma supports your example. Suppose that was a regular language - the middle Θ * can be pumped as much as you like. It has a * after all.
  • I can not deny. I paid $1 for stickers. They had Pusheen the cat. Come on! I actually wish more people were using iMessage so I could send them Pusheens.

    The best part about iMessage is that most of the stickers just come free as long as you have other apps installed already. For example, I installed this free to play crappy Sailor Moon matching game. I just put it in a junk folder and never open it. However, having it installed means I got Sailor Moon iMessage stickers.
  • The problem I run into these days is a particular one regarding older people (40+). They use IM in the office regularly, and respond immediately. BUT, they are unable to parse any moderately complex information there.

    So simple IMs work fine if my answer is one short sentence or less.

    Are you coming to the meeting?
    Yeah

    Is the code checked in?
    Nope, don't take a build yet.

    What's up with that problem you're working on?
    Still trying to get more logs.


    But anything more than that, and they invariably ask for me to call them. They want me to call them to say out loud the exact words I just typed. They are functionally incapable of parsing multiple sentences together in IM.
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