[lldata]

I will never adopt a google product again. g+ may be a total failure hangouts may be the less popular chat product

But for me and my kids this was the channels we used when they grew up. We have so much history in our family chat and so many photos shared on google+.

So now they just shut it down and don't even bother to migrate 10 years of my life to whatever is meant to replace those products.

We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.

[ImprovedSilence]

>> We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.

I mean, if you want you could hand write letters. Or post your chats on a private blog/wiki for posterities sake.

You might be older than me, but you just made me feel like an old timer. I feel like I learned this lesson when AIM shuttered, and I am now numb to the feeling that all our data is both fleeting and yet permanent. Everything since then I've been much less attached to any data I put out there unless I make a real effort to save it on my own bare metal. Also I like to think that somewhere I've got my AIM chat logs saved off in all their ever changing font/multi-colored glory....

(Obligatory mention of Google Reader, beloved by many, but completely contrary to the internet they want you to see)

[andai]

Serious question: why did they get rid of fonts and colors? And most IM apps still don't have handwriting. I had entire relationships built around sending back and forth silly drawings in handwriting.

I feel like the quality of instant messaging software peaked in the early 2000s, and 15 years later we still haven't achieved the same level, or even close?

[ImprovedSilence]

Good question. The cynic in me wants to say it's because chat apps can't mine "creative expression" like they can plain text . Or maybe just single-minded UI design thinking that under no circumstances should anyone use pink comic sans.... Either way, what you're describing really strikes home to me. I miss the internet that was full of colorful dialog, encouraged creative expression, and was full of interesting offbeat websites willing to inspire the imagination. These days even most of hacker news is atlantic or bloomberg articles, and I can't find any good design/image blogs that just curate good shit anymore (ffffound anyone?)....

[lostmsu]

Actually, you should not be relying on any social networks, if you want to keep history reliably. At least you can export all your data now.

[ehsankia]

By their own admission they got to use this product for over a decade, and somehow that's unacceptable. We also have no idea yet what the migration will be, and no matter what, your data most definitely won't be lost.

[derefr]

> We have so much history in our family chat

I don't think any IM chat product has ever promised to keep your history. They all let you "scroll back" on a best-effort basis, but I don't know of any IM chat service where the availability of historical messages is part of the semantics of the service. It's just... not what they're for.

If you want the semantics of "real-time chat with history", what you actually want is a business collaboration tool, like Slack or its competitors. Businesses want records of meetings and the ability to dredge up stuff somebody said once, and are willing to pay for it, so services designed with business productivity in mind tend to have these semantics.

(And even then, I don't think Slack makes any guarantees that it'll retain the history of your private DMs, only the history of your public channels. Exporting an archive of a Slack workspace doesn't get you archives of the DMs. So it would seem that, even for a business, the semantics of one-to-one conversations are more ephemeral than not.)

[eigenvector]

Chat history was absolutely part of the semantics of Google Talk/Hangouts. You've always been able to search that history in Gmail by using the filter "in:chats" and it used to be explicitly exposed in the Gmail UI as a label. Every last word is saved there unless you choose not to have it.

[PunchTornado]

Well I can trust Facebook Messenger to always keep my data there and never delete it.

Which for a chat service is really good.

[exitheone]

You can? When did they promise that? What is stopping them from throwing away history next year?

[cableshaft]

ICQ and Trillian would save your chat history if you put something in the settings. I don't think AIM did, but I was able to export them individually, I think. I still have a decent amount of my chat log history from back then because of it. I have a lot more of it from back then than I do now that it's all done within hangouts/facebook.

[acqq]

Some time ago there was that comics about the "Chad's garage":

https://xkcd.com/1150/

The most interesting point is, "Chad" is really actively promoting his garages as something the people should definitely use... until he changes his opinion from time to time which garage and if at all the people should use this or that, and then lets people figure out what should they do next.

And "Chad" is very rich and powerful, so people are attracted. Nice shelves every time.

[Rotareti]

That's the reason I choose OSS for everything where the data is important to me.