Well that's certainly interesting, but me too, I haven't really noticed that. Because while in the past, my primary reason for installing Pidgin was connecting

Well that's certainly interesting, but me too, I haven't really noticed that. Because while in the past, my primary reason for installing Pidgin was connecting to Google's excellent XMPP service, I now only have it hooked up to my Facebook account. I don't see any value in Hangouts. That's right. As creepy and closed as Facebook is, I still find it a much higher value service than Hangouts. Plus it actually lets me connect to people I know reliably. Hangouts is the perfect example of taking a good service and throwing it in the shitters. I can barely use the official Android-client. It's just gone completely downhill. It may not be too late for Google to recover from the terrible slope they've taken on ever since the persisted, user-hostile G+ fiasco, but I can't imagine the tarnish their brand has taken to ever have been worth it.