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Google Meet premium video conferencing is now free for everyone
- hadrien01 6y agoWait, they had something simple to understand (Duo for consumers, Meet for professionals), and now everyone has access to two different products doing about the same thing?! Google and messaging products... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat
- enitihas 6y agoAnd that page still doesn't list GTalk, the precursor for hangouts.
- Zarel 6y agoIt does, it's the second top-level bullet point: > Google Talk, a defunct instant messaging service released by Google in 2005 The page was last edited over a week ago, so it's not like I'm seeing a newer version than what you're seeing, either. Or did you think "GTalk" was an official brand? Google has never abbreviated it that way, only users.
- londons_explore 6y agoExcept they didn't interoperate, Duo didn't work on laptops, Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding...
- microcolonel 6y ago> Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding How did video decoding in software affect sound quality? Is this just a typo/brainfart?
- cameron_b 6y agoThe video encoding/decoding could have leveraged hardware accelerated codecs and freed up resources for audio encoding/decoding
- microcolonel 6y agoAudio encoding is not of particularly high complexity. Even the highest complexity modes of the best codec right now (Opus) are like 60-100x real time on commodity hardware, and not too far off on phones.
- IanCal 6y agoI don't know if it's what they mean but having your fans go absolutely nuts in every meeting can't be great for sound quality.
- londons_explore 6y agoHaving spent 5 mins debugging it... it looks like the audio and video buffers are occasionally not exactly the same lengths, and it causes a glitch in the audio whenever the audio buffer is slightly longer. It doesn't seem to happen when not CPU capped though, which I haven't quite figured out...
- officemonkey 6y agoDuo works fine on my $200 Chromebook.
- marticode 6y agoDuo works on any browser at https://duo.google.com https://duo.google.com
- ghaff 6y ago>Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop Certainly not my experience. I use a few different video platforms including Meet and have never noticed material differences in sound quality. I mostly use an iMac but it's about a 5 year old system so it's hardly high-end by today's standards.
- taborj 6y agoI have a wife and a child who use Meet regularly, both via sub-$400 laptops. No issues that they've reported.
- lima 6y agoDuo is for 1:1 video calls and has stickers and cute animations. Meet is a video conferencing tool. What's the confusion?
- abraham 6y agoDuo now supports 12 people on one call.
- interestica 6y agoHm, duodecuple is the tuple for 12. Maybe this was their plan all along.
- Mindwipe 6y agoNot on the web.
- wscott 6y agoMy account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings". This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition. I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)
- jimmcslim 6y agoYeah I'm only getting "Your account only lets you join meetings" as well... seems like there hasn't been a full roll out yet.
- byefruit 6y agoAre you both in the US? It could be another "free for everyone" where everyone means "US only for now". Pretty frustrating when that happens.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe post says “beginning next week”; not only has there not been a full roll-out yet, the phased roll-out hasn't started. The HN headline is misleading and inserts and “is now” that is not in the source (which instead just has an em-dash)
- aclelland 6y agoSecond paragraph says _with availability rolling out over the coming weeks_ so it looks like it might take a while for some people to get access.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings". from the blog post: It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available. Key phrase: “beginning next week”.
- rbinv 6y agoThey've also added Meet to G Suite mail menus. Is there a way to get rid of those links?
- icebraining 6y agoBlock the element using uBlock Origin?
- finstell 6y ago- Google Hangouts - Google Hangouts Meet - Google Hangouts Chat - Hangouts Chat - Google Chat - Google Talk - Google Allo - Google Due - Google Voice - Google Meet - Android Messages - Youtube Messages Product management at its best. Half of the time I don't know which app I am using.
- zo1 6y agoDuo as well?
- dr_dshiv 6y agoI love that in Google Hangouts chat, default chat app on Android phone, there is no search capability. I keep using it because I'm assuming they will add it eventually. I still find the Gmail+chat+hangout combo to be extremely robust and easy -- I just don't know why it isn't supported.
- kuu 6y agoSo we have now: - Google Hangouts - Google Meet - Google Duo Am I missing any other? Is there any difference between them?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rhmw2b 6y agoHangouts has video and chat and is being discontinued. - Google Meet: Zoom - Google Duo: Facetime - Google Chat: Slack
- jasonv 6y agowant to use google chat to replace the hangouts that I have with a certain group [because the hangouts interface and mobile notifications aren't great].. it's available for my G Suite accounts, but not my generic @gmail account. which is kind of maddening.
- aclelland 6y agoThis is great, we've been using Meet a lot since WFH started and it's been pretty solid and decent enough quality. My only gripe and unless I'm missing it, it's not possible to log into Meet on Android without also logging into the Google account on the device too. This is frustrating because sometimes I want to jump on a work call but all I've got is my personal device handy. I really wish they'd separate out Meet App users from Device users like the iOS version of the app :(
- antman 6y agoAnd also if you do something bad with your account the whole company can get locked out of their email, since now they are connected. Sending illegal photos to personal accounts of company members looks like a solid DOS attack vector. Google customer support only aggregates the problem.
- IanCal 6y agoCan't you do it in a browser? Then just use an incognito window - that's what I do for work emails when out and about.
- Eridrus 6y agoThis doesn't address your comment about device users per se, but you can have multiple accounts on your device and meet will let you choose which one to use when joining calls.
- aclelland 6y agoI'd have probably have had to do this but luckily I have an old phone that I can use for my work account. I just really don't like linking work and personal accounts at a device level given the multiple ways that might cause problems. Thinking on it a little more, I guess that since this product has been generally aimed at businesses, maybe this isn't normally a problem for people with company devices.
- izacus 6y agoAndroid has this concept of Work Profiles, where your work account apps are isolated from your personal apps. It works well with Meet and you have a single button to immediately disable all the Work apps (including their notifications). It gives you way better separation than anything on iOS.
- chki 6y agoThis is of course a good development for those cases where Jitsi is unstable. Although: >Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. So actually it won't be different from Zoom because there's going to be an - albeit longer - time limit. Not enforcing this during the upcoming months of quarantine is a nice move.
- draw_down 6y ago> for those cases where Jitsi is unstable. What does that mean? Why is it unstable? VC tools should be reliable pretty much above all else. I can’t think of one feature I care about more than that.
- Kjeldahl 6y agoIf I read it right, they still require everybody joining to have a Google account. Which means the others that don't require this will keep growing. I mean, we're a Google shop ok, but requiring our customers to use google accounts is just something that we can not do.
- dragonwriter 6y agoI think you are misreading it, and you only need a Google Account to host not to join.
- Leace 6y ago> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. This quote from the linked post would suggest otherwise.
- dragonwriter 6y agoMissed that, good point.
- taborj 6y agoI think what that means is, if you have a GSuite account, you can let anonymous users join your Meet. But if you just have an individual, personal account, you cannot. So, if you are a G shop already, then it shouldn't prevent your customers from joining your meeting without having a Google account. But if you're trying to host that meeting via a personal Gmail account, you will run into a problem if a non-Google account tries to join.
- ollyculverhouse 6y agoWe don't see that and use Meet (via GSuite) to have external calls with people and have never heard that that require a Google account.
- oaiey 6y ago
- bkovacev 6y agoWe are being spammed by Google Account Managers to join in on the Google Meet, even though it's not available for our basic tier. After we have specifically declined the invitation multiple times, we are now being spammed to join in for free until September 30th. I do not want to break the Account Manger's heart, but we simply cannot rely on any product Google makes[0]. We still use docs/sheets and email, but that's about it - hopefully they won't manage to kill/mess that up as well. [0] - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- sp332 6y agoYou don't have to rely on Meet being around forever though. Video chats are ephemeral and if Meet goes away for some reason, you can switch to something else without too much pain.
- cameron_b 6y agoIt’s not so painful these days but when we actually use conference rooms it’s a bit more painful to make all the microphones and cameras and displays and controllers talk to a new platform
- heavenlyblue 6y agoYou’re being spammed because their KPI shows that spamming their own Google Accounts increase the revenue from your account. Except they haven’t realised that the reason that revenue is increased is because the customers have to pay more for the email storage due to them spamming you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cett 6y agoGoogle don't generally seem to kill their enterprise cloud products, more the consumer ones
- Rebelgecko 6y agoAre you talking about the basic tier of GSuite? That actually does include Meet.
- Raed667 6y agoI just want to +1 Google Meet, its one of the rare video chat products that works without any flaws with 150+ people in a room.
- mft_ 6y agoDuring the CV lockdown, there's been a creeping adoption of paid Zoom accounts in the large company I work for, despite ubiquitous free Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite). This seems to be mainly based on the perception (which I share) that Zoom copes better with large meetings and/or bandwidth challenges, and possibly offering the 'tile view' that Meet previously lacked. (It may also be because of novelty, or novelties such as being able to replace the background, which people love.)
- ghaff 6y ago>Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite) This is one of the main reasons I mostly use Meet. It's basically a couple clicks in Google Calendar to add the video meeting link.
- oaiey 6y agoA couple? One for adding (or automatically always), Two when joining, One when you have hardware in physical meeting rooms. It is perfect.
- the_greyd 6y agoGoogle Plus Meet? Huh. Did somebody tell Raed667 our plan? We are supposed to be a secret until we kill the normal Google Meet and release our superior chat product Google Plus Meet.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y agoHN headline inserts “is now” incorrectly, the source headline does not say that and the text indicates a phased rollout starting next week.
- draw_down 6y agoThis is a space they probably should own by now, but they blew it by not having their messaging story together. Nobody can remember what this year’s Google messaging tool is, no use figuring it out because they’ll shutter it and replace it with something else soon. I don’t understand how they made this so confusing.
- Proven 6y agoAsleep at the wheel until May, now envious of the numbers scored by Zoom and others, huh?
- amelius 6y agoWhy aren't we all using free video chat clients that run over webrtc?
- 7777fps 6y agoIf you want a serious answer is because peer to peer webRTC doesn't scale beyond two people. If you have 4 people every client would need to maintain 3 streams, a total of 6 streams between all participants. To have any kind of scalability you need a proxy in the middle that can act as a single stream to each participant. This middlebox can also handle normalisation, interpolation and other useful features you might want to smooth things out when clients have connection difficulties. Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation? Because these days just publishing a protocol isn't enough for adoption; not to mention that proxying large amounts of data will incur a significant cost. And that hasn't covered the need for authentication, which is yet another required service. And if the proxy box is interpolating and gracefully handling frame drops, does that mean it will be handling gasp decrypted video traffic? Yes, it will, unless you want to move all that to the client and then have a key exchange happen not just at the start but a renegotiation every time someone connects or disconnects. So you see it's not as simple as, "everyone just opens this URL, webRTC is a thing duh".
- amelius 6y agoValid points, but challenges of this kind have never stopped open source developers before. By the way, one of the clients could serve as the middlebox, I suppose, to be determined by a consensus algorithm.
- icebraining 6y agoIn theory one could implement the "supernode" model using WebRTC, turning the client with the best connection into a middlebox as well. In practice I suppose many meetings don't have any clients with a connection that could support that kind of bandwidth requirements.
- organian 6y ago> Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation? Isn't that what Jitsi is doing? https://github.com/jitsi https://github.com/jitsi, meet.jit.si
- emptysands 6y agoMust use chrome extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v...
- williesleg 6y agoNice! Now they can steal more information from me! I love Google!
- thecybernerd 6y agoDid anyone notice the picture of the doctors office (in the press release) has a picture on the wall that is blurred out?
- foolinaround 6y agoand just like that, zoom now faces its doom....
- treebornfrog 6y agoSuddenly every big tech company wants a piece of the zoom pie. I quite like Google hangouts (now meet?), it's simple to use and comes packaged free with g-suite. I run a small business so for just myself it's less than $100. Amazing value.
- cactus2093 6y agoThe crazy thing is google had like 10 years where the zoom pie could have been theirs for the taking. But they always just let hangouts sit there without trying much of anything in the way of improving it. I swear for a good 3-5 years in the early to mid 2010’s, almost every time I’d try to join a hangout meeting in chrome the audio wouldn’t work and I’d have to restart the browser and try again. And now they’re actually trying? We’re they genuinely surprised to learn there’s a market for corporate video chat?
- treebornfrog 6y agoThey have so much cash they could use to build stuff and push in enterprise but don't. I feel as though they're a little directionless with their strategies. Best product they've created after Gmail has definitely been G suite though.
- oaiey 6y agoWe use Meet already for 3-4 years including hardware in the meeting rooms. It is awesome. Zoom got virally popular and had the big grid view which made it popular in these times. However, practically spoken, Meet was always there and was already productive for many years. Hangout != Meet
- stevespang 6y agoFree for Everyone until they decide to pull the plug and charge for it.
- EGreg 6y agoZoom grew a lot with the long tail. Facebook got in the game. Now Google. Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve. But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website. In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website. The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed. Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.? Web browsers alrrady have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc. There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough. That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc. These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable. So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components. Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN” We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app https://yang2020.app Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do: Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options) It’s as simple as that. And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot password, account management you just do: Q.Users.login(options) If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use Q.Calendars.addToCalendar() Reusable tools are placed like this: Q.activate( Q.Tool.setUpElement( element, “Streams/chat”, options ); ); or with jQuery: $(element).tool(name) .activate(options) You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. Our goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tesed reusable components that anyone can use, even if they are not very technical. Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It’s totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done. If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform. Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconferencd in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.
- Mindwipe 6y agoGoogle have got to learn that they have not rolled out a successful consumer product in quite some time whereas Apple do, and a big part of it is this stupid, stupid "rolling out in the next few weeks" attitude they love so much. Product launches need a big red go button in 2020 or they don't work, especially when you're already three months behind the curve.
- solarkraft 6y agoOh look! They made another communication tool!
- devy 6y agoAnd Zoom stock is down 7% right now. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+ZM https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+ZM
- charwalker 6y agoIt can't do PC audio when presenting so a video or other content won't make it through without cleverly routing your PC audio through your mic. I have a GSuite account for my domain as it has a lot of useful tools for cheap (1 user). I was using it for hang out type sessions with friends and family but we moved to other tools to play party games or similar with others. I guess where I'm going is if they allowed audio when presenting I'd use it for everything again.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoI hope Google eats Zoom alive by just throwing resources and whatever cloud service power at this. Video chat should only always have been browser based website/web app and never involved installers and stuff.