I know this is just anecdotal, but my friends and I do heavily use Hangouts. It doesn't have enough functionality on its own, but I've augmented our experience

I know this is just anecdotal, but my friends and I do heavily use Hangouts. It doesn't have enough functionality on its own, but I've augmented our experience with a chatbot powered by https://github.com/hangoutsbot/hangoutsbot https://github.com/hangoutsbot/hangoutsbot. Obviously I don't think that this experience is typical, not everyone is a programmer or has a server on which to run it.