arethinn: animated Space Ghost shaking his head (frustrated (space ghost))
Arethinn ([personal profile] arethinn) wrote2019-12-20 08:03 am

(no subject)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-hangouts-shutdown-begins-october-2019/

Somehow I didn't manage to hear of this 11 months ago. ARGH. How many messengers is this I've had to replace, now? I just want to talk to my husband while I'm at work and he's at home on our desktop computers (is the use case 75-90% of the time depending on his class schedule; more rarely I message from my desktop or tablet to his phone), preferably with changeable userpic, display name (not that Google passes that through - a feature we lost when we had to give up MSN), and status message. Why has that gotta be so hard?

(Specifically what we use is the Google Talk protocol in Instantbird, itself no longer developed, but the message history is shared with both Hangouts as app and as integrated in Gmail.)
drwho: A portrait of my most commonly used avatar. (Default)

[personal profile] drwho 2019-12-25 07:29 pm (UTC)(link)
It was only announced for GSuite users at the time - they kept it quiet for the consumer market. For what it's worth, just about all 40k+ users at $dayjob don't use it and never have - Slack's the defacto standard.

For personal stuff, I'd recommend Jabber or maybe Rocketchat.