8 ms·

Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Bright Spot for Google+

63 points by whosbacon 13y ago

hkmurakami 13y ago
"Line Chat" (a smartphone IM app in Japan) became the #1 "social network" extremely quickly in Japan and its reach is slowly spreading to other countries as well. (It blew by Facebook and its mainstream acceptance is must be well beyond Twitter by now) http://line.naver.jp/en/ http://line.naver.jp/en/ Google+ might be onto something by focusing on "IM/chat" and other means of communication, particularly outside of the united states.
- yock 13y ago
  It seems obvious to me. SMS still lies outside of their control, and replacing it with something that goes through their servers would give them access to massive amounts of data otherwise unavailable to them.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Yes, but leaving out the SMS feature in the app still leaves their IM system fragmented. SMS is essential in places where data plans are prohibitively expensive.
    - fdr_cs 13y ago
      Or unreliable. I live at Brazil, and 3G connection here is awful, everywhere !
- adrow 13y ago
  I quite like using Line, and prefer it to WhatsApp (which most people in my contacts seem to have). My main gripe however is the lack of a browser chat option. They have a desktop client but I'd rather not have to install that just to chat at my desk. That's where Google has the edge I think.
  - jeffasinger 13y ago
    I've used WeChat a little. It does have a decent browser option - but no desktop option which I would've liked.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Even if Google puts Hangouts in all the new Android OS releases, and with some upgrading it manually, they'd still be much better off buying either Whatsapp, Viber or Line, to get a solid base immediately of such "SMS alternative app" users.
  - technoslut 13y ago
    If reports are true then they did look into this. There are just too many complications in buying these services. The popularity of these apps are regional, some have deals with carriers and they'll still have to integrate it with their own services which they're attempting to do already with their own offerings. They'll still be faced with the same problem of enticing users to switch to their service. I think Google took the reasonable path.
rwmj 13y ago
We use Hangouts extensively for meetings. They've almost replaced conference calls. Good stuff: - Works well, even with relatively poor network conditions and people located in many continents. - Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction. - Doesn't crash (you'd think this would not be notable, but try Skype some time ...) Bad stuff: - User interface sucks. I get confused every single time I try to start a new hangout. There seem to be multiple ways to start a hangout, none of them obvious. - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private. - Privacy of the whole thing is suspect (it is Google after all). The G+ plugin is incredibly invasive, to the point where I have a separate computer entirely for G+ / hangouts and I use it for nothing else.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  > - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private. Yep, so you end up making it public, then going back and downloading it, then deleting it from YouTube. Google seems to have a fixation that everything in the universe must exist on the web -- and be accessed by typing into the Google search box. Whatever we do in life, we get back to it from that little search box.
  - aerique 13y ago
    While they could just get valuable information from private communication without making it public.
- mtgx 13y ago
  I just can't wait until they begin supporting the VP9 codec in it. I presume this is the main reason why they haven't launched 10-way Hangouts with 720p resolution yet. VP9 should help with that. I'm not sure I understand why they can't even offer 720p recording for the videos, though, even if they can't do 720p streaming right now.
- shadowfiend 13y ago
  For what it's worth, we've been using UberConference ( http://www.uberconference.com http://www.uberconference.com ) to do conference calls and it's been quite good. No video, though.
kmfrk 13y ago
Original/Current article title: "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+" It'll be interesting how important MOOCs will be to the direction and success of Google's efforts to create a social platform. The last time I tried out G+ was a few weeks ago, and I can't emphasize just how heinous the UI was - so heinous that I got the impression that it must have been deliberately so.
ippisl 13y ago
One thing that can really improve hangouts is eye contact.This is probably the main difference between video conferecing and the more expensive telepresence , which is replacing flights for business meetings. While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance: from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]": """ TV Set-top design Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”. An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦ error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance. """ [1]http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/p423.pdf http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/... [2]https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS
- kalleboo 13y ago
  It would be cool if someone could engineer a phone with the front camera behind the LCD screen somehow.
  - roc 13y ago
    http://www.google.com/patents/US7535468 http://www.google.com/patents/US7535468 Given how long ago that was, I'm guessing it still doesn't quite work, it doesn't fit into a feasible footprint, or it interferes with some other more-valued part of the current backlight/display/glass arrangement.
philf 13y ago
Unfortunately I installed Hangout on my phone this morning and basically destroyed most of the utility GTalk had. None of my Google Talk contacts can send messages to my mobile, I can't see them in my contact list (not even people with Google accounts that don't use G+) and for the remaining ones with G+ accounts there's no presence information I can recognize.
- thwarted 13y ago
  I have two google apps for domains accounts, on personal and one for work, and since the hangouts app shows your contacts, and the contacts are not strictly bound to a g-account on the phone when browsing, the contacts lists and circles are all mixed up. I'm paranoid about chatting with someone at work via my personal account and then polluting their seen-people history contact list with my personal account. This was much easier to keep separate with the gtalk app. I may need two phones to keep this stuff separate properly.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Yes, that pissed me off, too. The messenger is now basically the old G+ Messenger, and not Gtalk. Also if they were going to do this, they should've done it across all Gtalk platforms at once, so nobody feels the "fragmentation" between the services. I heard it will begin being rolled out to Gmail soon, but still. It all should've happened in day one.
  - Hurdy 13y ago
    It's being rolled out to Gmail since day 1. You can't launch something like this to several 100 millions of users in an hour.
- rtpg 13y ago
  The one thing that really annoyed me is that all my AIM contacts disappeared. Granted I only have 2 people with which I talk regularly, but one of them is pretty much my best friend, and luckily I have other venues of communication because if not I would have lost contact with him forever because Google hates me.
franze 13y ago
i once installed the hangouts plugin on my 2009 mac book pro, killed the webcam, complained in a help thread, no response, in the end had to reinstall the OS.... as soon as it goes all-in HTML5/getUserMedia i will try it again.
bonaldi 13y ago
I think when this hits GMail in earnest there's going to be another huge outcry. Judging by my contact list and the lists of others I see, statuses and presence are a really big deal: people use red-dot to mean "I'm here but interrupt me only if it's crucial" and green-dot to say "fire at will!". Hangouts supports none of this, only a very simplistic "I'm actively on a device". There's no way to append "... and I'm working, so please don't interrupt unless you have to". You can mute notifications, for a preset amount of time, but that's not the same either -- it's turning off your phone rather than setting it to silent. I guess they see this as "advanced" functionality, but judging by the people I know it isn't. They may have just copied Facebook, but Facebook messenger isn't something people leave on all day, and it also allows you to selectively block groups of chatty people until you're ready for them.
- MikeKusold 13y ago
  I think they are trying to replace text messaging. When you text someone you have no concept of their availability. If they were to add statuses, then you would never send a message to someone that was offline/away.
- emu 13y ago
  If you ask me, the Hangouts actually is a huge improvement over the old Google Talk. I never sign into the old Talk on my gmail account because I find it very very distracting. The presumption of Talk (or other IM clients) is that if I am online, then I am willing to be interrupted to answer your message immediately. That's absolutely not the case --- if I'm working, I'll answer your message later. The Hangouts (SMS-like) model is much more useful to me --- you can always feel free send me a message, but I will answer it when I see fit. Hangouts gives a hint as to whether I'm likely to read your message soon, but there's no promise of a synchronous response.
  - bonaldi 13y ago
    That's what away statuses are for! "I'm signed in, but I'm not willing to be interrupted". Hangouts takes away the very thing you say you need. The SMS model is much less useful to IM users. If I was willing to wait for a reply at the other person's convenience, I wouldn't be IMing them, I'd email or SMS them. IM is the online equivalent of a voice call: live and direct. That's going away with hangouts, and that's bad. I don't want to start having to make phone calls again /shudder.
buro9 13y ago
I don't understand what Hangouts is as a product. I have 1 Gmail account and 2 Google Apps accounts. I use Gtalk and have G+ configured on the Gmail, and 1 domain has Gtalk enabled and G+ disabled, and the other has both disabled. This morning I installed Hangouts on my Android as I read the press about how this would replace Gtalk and figured I should get used to the interface. What is now displayed confuses me greatly. Is this G+? How come this app is working on the domains on which it is disabled? Is this Gtalk? How come I cannot see/find my Gtalk contacts and my native Gmail account is showing me what I recognise as circles in the place I would expect to see my Gtalk contacts. Where are the archived chats from Gtalk? Still archived in my Gmail? If so, why does this app say I have no archived chats? Will future archived items be in my Gmail? Even for the domains in which G+ is disabled (if, as I'm currently assuming they will actually be in G+ because otherwise it would show the archived chats that are in my Gmail)? The native Gmail seems to allow group chat, but the corporate account doesn't... why? It asked to confirm my number, but doesn't seem to like the fact that all three accounts are 1 number... why? I am the same person, several accounts and 1 phone. I simply don't know what Hangouts is as a product and how the various accounts I have will work or what options should be set where to make it predictable. And just to top off the confusion, my girlfriend has clearly added the app too, as I got a confused email from her and 5 minutes later an email asking me to install Whats App. I feel I've gone from something I knew and had control of, to something that really confuses. I've told my girlfriend to just send me an email or call me... we can both just understand that. Is there some epiphany I'm missing? Edit: This is in the context of someone who is very familiar with the existing/old offerings and used them a fair bit. It's the 'replacing' bit and not being able to see anything familiar or old in the new which makes it confounding.
- seiji 13y ago
  I don't understand what Hangouts is as a product. It's another huge marketing/branding failure by Google too. They expect the world to learn intimate details of all their crazy products that aren't hinted at by naming. Google loves to hijack short and extremely common words to use as opaque identifiers for products. Examples: "Google Wave" -- meaningless unless you read about it extensively. "Circles" -- takes a while for people to realize it's actually "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time." "Google Hangouts" -- okay, "hangout" kinda works, but it feels way too casual. I don't want to "hangout" with most work people. What is it anyway? Video chat? Text chat? A Skype replacement? Mobile messaging focused? People don't really know unless they research it first.
Matt_Cutts 13y ago
The headline and url for this article is actually "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+"--not sure why the HN title is "Hangouts are swallowing all other Google communication clients"? If you're going to rewrite the title, it could just as easily have been "Google attempts to unify its messaging products."
- jayjay1010 13y ago
  HI Matt, I'm in San Jose for the next few days and would love to meet you at an event or something? talk about spam and the up coming updates, especially since were from the other side of the world (London), are you at any events that we could meet at, were here attending the bitcoin2013 and ieee, if your interested.
zwieback 13y ago
The article starts by stating Google+ has not really gone anywhere. I don't use any social networks so I wouldn't know but I notice my daughters (10/12) talking about Google+ a lot (although I don't allow them to use it yet). I'm wondering if G+ is taking off with the younger crowd since there's a logical pathway from Gmail which seems to be the mail everyone at that age uses. The same seems to be true for Google chat, which my daughters use a lot.
mynewwork 13y ago
I "upgraded" the talk app on my phone to hangout. It was a terrible decision, it's destroyed the primary use of my phone (using gchat while at work, on the go, etc). It mixed my gchat and phone contacts, so now the list of contacts is a giant unusable mess. I can't see who of my friends are online. They moved the send button from being at the bottom-right of the virtual keyboard to above the keyboard next to the input text area which is awkward. I don't use google+ and yet multiple friends were "blocked in google+" and I had to unblock them. GChat / google talk have been the primary way I've kept in touch with friends and family for years. The android talk app was perfect - intuitive, fast, simple. It provided exactly what I needed - who is online, away, busy, offline and a fast simple way to chat with them. If this is the future for gchat, I'm going to have to try to convince friends and family to switch back to AIM or MSN Messenger.
- gwillen 13y ago
  Convince them to switch to XMPP instead. Get an account from Jabber.org, and install Pidgin or Adium. Then they can talk to anybody else with an XMPP account on any domain, which includes Google Talk users until that service gets nuked.
zeruch 13y ago
For small teams I prefer hangouts to anything else (GoToHellMeeting, WebHex, et al). They do need to make the archiving and extraction of data from hangouts into something easily consumed by mortals. Beyond its most root function (videoconferencing) its not a terribly well designed UX.
tyang 13y ago
Startup investor here. I do lots of video calls, practically all on Hangout. No founder has ever had an issue figuring it out. YMMV.

63 points by whosbacon 13y ago

"Line Chat" (a smartphone IM app in Japan) became the #1 "social network" extremely quickly in Japan and its reach is slowly spreading to other countries as well. (It blew by Facebook and its mainstream acceptance is must be well beyond Twitter by now) http://line.naver.jp/en/ http://line.naver.jp/en/ Google+ might be onto something by focusing on "IM/chat" and other means of communication, particularly outside of the united states.

yock 13y ago
It seems obvious to me. SMS still lies outside of their control, and replacing it with something that goes through their servers would give them access to massive amounts of data otherwise unavailable to them.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Yes, but leaving out the SMS feature in the app still leaves their IM system fragmented. SMS is essential in places where data plans are prohibitively expensive.
  - fdr_cs 13y ago
    Or unreliable. I live at Brazil, and 3G connection here is awful, everywhere !
adrow 13y ago
I quite like using Line, and prefer it to WhatsApp (which most people in my contacts seem to have). My main gripe however is the lack of a browser chat option. They have a desktop client but I'd rather not have to install that just to chat at my desk. That's where Google has the edge I think.
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  I've used WeChat a little. It does have a decent browser option - but no desktop option which I would've liked.
mtgx 13y ago
Even if Google puts Hangouts in all the new Android OS releases, and with some upgrading it manually, they'd still be much better off buying either Whatsapp, Viber or Line, to get a solid base immediately of such "SMS alternative app" users.
- technoslut 13y ago
  If reports are true then they did look into this. There are just too many complications in buying these services. The popularity of these apps are regional, some have deals with carriers and they'll still have to integrate it with their own services which they're attempting to do already with their own offerings. They'll still be faced with the same problem of enticing users to switch to their service. I think Google took the reasonable path.

rwmj 13y ago

We use Hangouts extensively for meetings. They've almost replaced conference calls. Good stuff: - Works well, even with relatively poor network conditions and people located in many continents. - Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction. - Doesn't crash (you'd think this would not be notable, but try Skype some time ...) Bad stuff: - User interface sucks. I get confused every single time I try to start a new hangout. There seem to be multiple ways to start a hangout, none of them obvious. - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private. - Privacy of the whole thing is suspect (it is Google after all). The G+ plugin is incredibly invasive, to the point where I have a separate computer entirely for G+ / hangouts and I use it for nothing else.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
> - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private. Yep, so you end up making it public, then going back and downloading it, then deleting it from YouTube. Google seems to have a fixation that everything in the universe must exist on the web -- and be accessed by typing into the Google search box. Whatever we do in life, we get back to it from that little search box.
- aerique 13y ago
  While they could just get valuable information from private communication without making it public.
mtgx 13y ago
I just can't wait until they begin supporting the VP9 codec in it. I presume this is the main reason why they haven't launched 10-way Hangouts with 720p resolution yet. VP9 should help with that. I'm not sure I understand why they can't even offer 720p recording for the videos, though, even if they can't do 720p streaming right now.
shadowfiend 13y ago
For what it's worth, we've been using UberConference ( http://www.uberconference.com http://www.uberconference.com ) to do conference calls and it's been quite good. No video, though.

kmfrk 13y ago

Original/Current article title: "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+" It'll be interesting how important MOOCs will be to the direction and success of Google's efforts to create a social platform. The last time I tried out G+ was a few weeks ago, and I can't emphasize just how heinous the UI was - so heinous that I got the impression that it must have been deliberately so.

ippisl 13y ago

One thing that can really improve hangouts is eye contact.This is probably the main difference between video conferecing and the more expensive telepresence , which is replacing flights for business meetings. While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance: from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]": """ TV Set-top design Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”. An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦ error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance. """ [1]http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/p423.pdf http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/... [2]https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS

kalleboo 13y ago
It would be cool if someone could engineer a phone with the front camera behind the LCD screen somehow.
- roc 13y ago
  http://www.google.com/patents/US7535468 http://www.google.com/patents/US7535468 Given how long ago that was, I'm guessing it still doesn't quite work, it doesn't fit into a feasible footprint, or it interferes with some other more-valued part of the current backlight/display/glass arrangement.

philf 13y ago

Unfortunately I installed Hangout on my phone this morning and basically destroyed most of the utility GTalk had. None of my Google Talk contacts can send messages to my mobile, I can't see them in my contact list (not even people with Google accounts that don't use G+) and for the remaining ones with G+ accounts there's no presence information I can recognize.

thwarted 13y ago
I have two google apps for domains accounts, on personal and one for work, and since the hangouts app shows your contacts, and the contacts are not strictly bound to a g-account on the phone when browsing, the contacts lists and circles are all mixed up. I'm paranoid about chatting with someone at work via my personal account and then polluting their seen-people history contact list with my personal account. This was much easier to keep separate with the gtalk app. I may need two phones to keep this stuff separate properly.
mtgx 13y ago
Yes, that pissed me off, too. The messenger is now basically the old G+ Messenger, and not Gtalk. Also if they were going to do this, they should've done it across all Gtalk platforms at once, so nobody feels the "fragmentation" between the services. I heard it will begin being rolled out to Gmail soon, but still. It all should've happened in day one.
- Hurdy 13y ago
  It's being rolled out to Gmail since day 1. You can't launch something like this to several 100 millions of users in an hour.
rtpg 13y ago
The one thing that really annoyed me is that all my AIM contacts disappeared. Granted I only have 2 people with which I talk regularly, but one of them is pretty much my best friend, and luckily I have other venues of communication because if not I would have lost contact with him forever because Google hates me.

franze 13y ago

i once installed the hangouts plugin on my 2009 mac book pro, killed the webcam, complained in a help thread, no response, in the end had to reinstall the OS.... as soon as it goes all-in HTML5/getUserMedia i will try it again.

bonaldi 13y ago

I think when this hits GMail in earnest there's going to be another huge outcry. Judging by my contact list and the lists of others I see, statuses and presence are a really big deal: people use red-dot to mean "I'm here but interrupt me only if it's crucial" and green-dot to say "fire at will!". Hangouts supports none of this, only a very simplistic "I'm actively on a device". There's no way to append "... and I'm working, so please don't interrupt unless you have to". You can mute notifications, for a preset amount of time, but that's not the same either -- it's turning off your phone rather than setting it to silent. I guess they see this as "advanced" functionality, but judging by the people I know it isn't. They may have just copied Facebook, but Facebook messenger isn't something people leave on all day, and it also allows you to selectively block groups of chatty people until you're ready for them.

MikeKusold 13y ago
I think they are trying to replace text messaging. When you text someone you have no concept of their availability. If they were to add statuses, then you would never send a message to someone that was offline/away.
emu 13y ago
If you ask me, the Hangouts actually is a huge improvement over the old Google Talk. I never sign into the old Talk on my gmail account because I find it very very distracting. The presumption of Talk (or other IM clients) is that if I am online, then I am willing to be interrupted to answer your message immediately. That's absolutely not the case --- if I'm working, I'll answer your message later. The Hangouts (SMS-like) model is much more useful to me --- you can always feel free send me a message, but I will answer it when I see fit. Hangouts gives a hint as to whether I'm likely to read your message soon, but there's no promise of a synchronous response.
- bonaldi 13y ago
  That's what away statuses are for! "I'm signed in, but I'm not willing to be interrupted". Hangouts takes away the very thing you say you need. The SMS model is much less useful to IM users. If I was willing to wait for a reply at the other person's convenience, I wouldn't be IMing them, I'd email or SMS them. IM is the online equivalent of a voice call: live and direct. That's going away with hangouts, and that's bad. I don't want to start having to make phone calls again /shudder.

buro9 13y ago

I don't understand what Hangouts is as a product. I have 1 Gmail account and 2 Google Apps accounts. I use Gtalk and have G+ configured on the Gmail, and 1 domain has Gtalk enabled and G+ disabled, and the other has both disabled. This morning I installed Hangouts on my Android as I read the press about how this would replace Gtalk and figured I should get used to the interface. What is now displayed confuses me greatly. Is this G+? How come this app is working on the domains on which it is disabled? Is this Gtalk? How come I cannot see/find my Gtalk contacts and my native Gmail account is showing me what I recognise as circles in the place I would expect to see my Gtalk contacts. Where are the archived chats from Gtalk? Still archived in my Gmail? If so, why does this app say I have no archived chats? Will future archived items be in my Gmail? Even for the domains in which G+ is disabled (if, as I'm currently assuming they will actually be in G+ because otherwise it would show the archived chats that are in my Gmail)? The native Gmail seems to allow group chat, but the corporate account doesn't... why? It asked to confirm my number, but doesn't seem to like the fact that all three accounts are 1 number... why? I am the same person, several accounts and 1 phone. I simply don't know what Hangouts is as a product and how the various accounts I have will work or what options should be set where to make it predictable. And just to top off the confusion, my girlfriend has clearly added the app too, as I got a confused email from her and 5 minutes later an email asking me to install Whats App. I feel I've gone from something I knew and had control of, to something that really confuses. I've told my girlfriend to just send me an email or call me... we can both just understand that. Is there some epiphany I'm missing? Edit: This is in the context of someone who is very familiar with the existing/old offerings and used them a fair bit. It's the 'replacing' bit and not being able to see anything familiar or old in the new which makes it confounding.

seiji 13y ago
I don't understand what Hangouts is as a product. It's another huge marketing/branding failure by Google too. They expect the world to learn intimate details of all their crazy products that aren't hinted at by naming. Google loves to hijack short and extremely common words to use as opaque identifiers for products. Examples: "Google Wave" -- meaningless unless you read about it extensively. "Circles" -- takes a while for people to realize it's actually "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time." "Google Hangouts" -- okay, "hangout" kinda works, but it feels way too casual. I don't want to "hangout" with most work people. What is it anyway? Video chat? Text chat? A Skype replacement? Mobile messaging focused? People don't really know unless they research it first.

Matt_Cutts 13y ago

The headline and url for this article is actually "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+"--not sure why the HN title is "Hangouts are swallowing all other Google communication clients"? If you're going to rewrite the title, it could just as easily have been "Google attempts to unify its messaging products."

jayjay1010 13y ago
HI Matt, I'm in San Jose for the next few days and would love to meet you at an event or something? talk about spam and the up coming updates, especially since were from the other side of the world (London), are you at any events that we could meet at, were here attending the bitcoin2013 and ieee, if your interested.

zwieback 13y ago

The article starts by stating Google+ has not really gone anywhere. I don't use any social networks so I wouldn't know but I notice my daughters (10/12) talking about Google+ a lot (although I don't allow them to use it yet). I'm wondering if G+ is taking off with the younger crowd since there's a logical pathway from Gmail which seems to be the mail everyone at that age uses. The same seems to be true for Google chat, which my daughters use a lot.

mynewwork 13y ago

I "upgraded" the talk app on my phone to hangout. It was a terrible decision, it's destroyed the primary use of my phone (using gchat while at work, on the go, etc). It mixed my gchat and phone contacts, so now the list of contacts is a giant unusable mess. I can't see who of my friends are online. They moved the send button from being at the bottom-right of the virtual keyboard to above the keyboard next to the input text area which is awkward. I don't use google+ and yet multiple friends were "blocked in google+" and I had to unblock them. GChat / google talk have been the primary way I've kept in touch with friends and family for years. The android talk app was perfect - intuitive, fast, simple. It provided exactly what I needed - who is online, away, busy, offline and a fast simple way to chat with them. If this is the future for gchat, I'm going to have to try to convince friends and family to switch back to AIM or MSN Messenger.

gwillen 13y ago
Convince them to switch to XMPP instead. Get an account from Jabber.org, and install Pidgin or Adium. Then they can talk to anybody else with an XMPP account on any domain, which includes Google Talk users until that service gets nuked.

zeruch 13y ago

For small teams I prefer hangouts to anything else (GoToHellMeeting, WebHex, et al). They do need to make the archiving and extraction of data from hangouts into something easily consumed by mortals. Beyond its most root function (videoconferencing) its not a terribly well designed UX.

tyang 13y ago

Startup investor here. I do lots of video calls, practically all on Hangout. No founder has ever had an issue figuring it out. YMMV.