In theory, although as has already been said it's absolutely massive, so much so that my older machines won't even run it.

Last time I used it it was also flakey, horrible, every single update made it worse to use, and last I heard it didn't run properly on Linux (although that may have been sorted out now, I don't know, I gave up on it).

I basically try to forget it exists, as everyone should.

Although not the most wonderful software in the world, Hangouts (neé Gtalk/Gchat/GoogleVoice) just works, and everybody with an Android phone (most people I know) has it as standard.

I prefer BDSM Saturdays myself...

(Good post otherwise, though.)

Yes, this to me is the biggest surprise and irony about the whole thing. Having spent years lurking on the PPRuNe pilots' forum, watching smug Boeing lovers loudly proclaiming how they'd never fly an Airbus because Boeing doesn't have all that automated protection stuff (that to be fair, can catch you out in incredibly rare circumstances, much rarer than two fatals in five months though)... well if it weren't for the several hundred dead people the schadenfreude would be glorious.

...but I'm extremely pissed off about the forthcoming death of Hangouts.

Once upon a time we has MSN Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk/Chat/Voice to name but three. Now all gone (or about to go).

Surely somebody can supply a text and occasional voice/video chat program that will work on Windows, Linux, iOS & Android? In a world this big is that too much to ask? Apparently so, unless someone can tell me better...

Hilarious that it did that whilst letting the ASCII-art swastikas above through unmolested!

Absolutely. Like many others here, it was the "real name" policy, and especially Google nuking years'-worth of your old emails if you failed it, that absolutely killed G+ stone-dead at birth for me and everybody I knew. Nobody wanted to touch it with a bargepole after those first reports of punitive data loss came out.

They had a golden window of opportunity to kill Facebook at a time when everybody hated it, and they completely and utterly botched it.

(I wrote more about this on here three years ago, as did many others, but tbh the above is a better, less waffly, summary.)

Same here. Came to post the exact same thing. Most disquieting; when did THAT happen?

What if the granny's only 32? (Or 37 if your local age of consent is 18?)

Great-grannies are safer.

Let me see...

MS-DOS 4.0 to 5.0 was a massive improvement.

Word 6.0 to Word 97 - at last, it would print the individual pages you actually wanted, and editing tables no longer crashed it!

Win ME / NT 4.0 to Win XP was an improvement (yes, even over the latter).

But since then? Not so much. Not at all, really. All been downhill since then and I can only agree with you after that.

...the option to pay.

When EE in the UK closed down all the old Freeserve accounts last year, some of them (including mine) going back nearly 20 years, there was no such option. I had to move my entire "real world" emails (banking, bills, credit cards, various insurances, tax, local authorities, shopping, etc.) elsewhere, having to notify around 40 different entities of the change as well as moving all my old emails over.

To be honest I had been surprised that the service had remained free for so long, and I'd been expecting the inevitable "we now need to charge you £4.99/month" email for years.

What I didn't expect was closure, given that at one time this was the most popular non-ISP email service in the UK. A complete and utter pain that has ensured I will never use an EE service ever again.

About the only good thing you can say about it is they did give a LOT of notice... around four months or so. But even so... well you can tell I'm still butthurt!

Brilliant post. I'm the same age as you and used to be a software developer in a high-value industry. Our UIs always stayed broadly the same and only ever changed or added features in response to customer demand, not because some jumped-up marketing twat thought it would be a good idea to change it. Never took away features ever, why would we do that? Buried one once under an Advanced menu when we realised that too many novice users were accidentally screwing shit up with it, but never removed it.

Like you, this modern trend for changing everything all the time for no good reason is driving me insane, almost literally in fact. In the past five years I've lost (or had rendered unusable) my favourite OS, three of my favourite email programs (and the email address I'd had for 17 years), three chat applications (have lost touch with so many people), my favourite music player, several excellent and much-missed websites and doubtless more if I could be bothered to remember. The online world feels like it's shrinking, not expanding.

As a result it's actually got to the point where I'm starting to withdraw from techy stuff altogether... not bought any gadgets in years and my presence on and usage of the internet is becoming rarer and rarer and thinner and thinner on the ground. Am slowly shutting my accounts down one by one as I go, before they do it for me.

From a 15-year-old hacking together 6502 code on a Commodore PET, to this. I guess I got old.

Alt-` (or whatever your particular keyboard's key next to "1" is...

Just when I'd finally got used to the damn thing, after years of complaining about its early versions...

Thank you!

I'd almost given up with Pidgin because out of my original four (Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk/Hangouts) only the latter was left; last time I looked they didn't have a plugin for the new Yahoo, and the Skype support needed you to load the official client (which rather defeated the object, since I'm RAM-limited) -- now it looks as if it doesn't.

I can see I'll have to install the new version and give those new plugins a try.

The deliberate and malicious balkanisation of chat protocols -- which at one point around ten years ago looked as if they were all going to coalesce into one glorious unified system -- is something that really really annoys me. God knows how many people I've lost touch with over the years because of it.