Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#121

Post by crb » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #115

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this…

Certainly.

Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new.

Duo is FaceTime for Android.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#122

Post by olofl » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:22 AM UTC

petters wrote: post #6

I left Google and the Meet team a while ago. Would have been great to experience this 30x growth though! Being oncall these days would have been interesting. I have used Meet a lot both personally and professionally this spring and I think it's great. Been waiting for this announcement!

Miss you on the team :)

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#123

Post by deadmutex » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #115

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this…

Meet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack.

Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime.

Hangouts is old school Google+ tech, the whereas the others use newer tech. E.g. There is some impressive tech behind Duo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in..., https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#124

Post by bigiain » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

BillinghamJ wrote: post #86

numakerg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that link the account to the device's hardware ID and by extension, all the other accounts you've made on that device?

No? The web's security model does not expose such identifiers. The best you can do is fingerprinting, which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers

> which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers

... except the dominant one (at least for their own web properties), who just happen to be the adversary in this particular discussion.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#125

Post by Traster » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

This is great, did they list the financial commitments they made to keeping this product running for a minimum of 10 years? Because I don't see why anyone would migrate to a Google product. If you start using Zoom today, you've got a fair expectation that it will be around for a while. If you start using Microsoft Teams you can be extremely confident it'll be around for heat death of the universe. If you start using Google Meet today, I'd advise you to have a backup plan.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#126

Post by abraham » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

crb wrote: post #121

gregdoesit wrote: post #115

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this…

Certainly. Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new. Duo is FaceTime for Android.

Duo is also available on iOS and web.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#127

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63

londons_explore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". I…

> "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password" Speaking of that, my last experience with Google Meet in business setting was this: every other meeting someone from our team would disappear in the middle of a call and reappear a minute later. Reason? Google's bullshit random "you need to re-verify yourself and type in your password NOW NOW NOW!" prompt that logs you out until you comply.…

Can someone from the gaia team change the default cookie validity period down by 20 minutes (ie. from 30 days to 29 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes) to resolve this issue?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#128

Post by La1n » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

cameronbrown wrote: post #117

jedberg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends. Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and…

> Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update. If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by default. > They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people reminding them of the…

>Those Zoom links aren't obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.

You should edit them out though, otherwise you are going to have people click the link they always used to click.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#129

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

hknd wrote: post #99

thsealienbstrds wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security reasons.

no it's always optional - they recommend adding one to be able to retrieve a lost/hacked account

It depends on their risk assessment based on all sorts of stuff (perhaps like your IP, browser info, mouse movements etc.). If you're suspicious (VPN, Tor, heuristics etc.), they require the phone confirmation.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#130

Post by llarsson » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

disillusioned wrote: post #95

llarsson wrote: post #82

Ok, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely new service, or just re-branded Hangouts? When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout. My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?

Your confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and entirely different service. Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong video/voice…

Thank you for listing an ecosystem of services that, from my point of view, seem to be overlapping quite a bit.

I hope they can prune or merge some of it, because it sounds exhausting: do I as a GSuite user talk with an external person (say, for a job interview) over a Meet or a Duo or a Hangout Classic... and what are the privacy policy implications of such a choice? Too exhausting!