Google Talk

Google Talk, the instant messaging and voice calling service launched by Google in August 2005, died in June 2017, survived by the Hangouts application, which few requested and fewer preferred. It was lean, fast, and built on open standards — among the rare Google products that treated simplicity as a virtue rather than an oversight. Its support for the XMPP protocol permitted federation with outside services, a gesture of openness that its successors would not repeat.

It was killed not by neglect in the ordinary sense but by a corporation’s recurring conviction that what worked plainly could be made to work more elaborately. Google Talk asked nothing of its users and returned that courtesy. Those who used it remember the absence of ceremony. They have not found its like again.