Just tried out this Tactiq extension which will save the Closed Captions. Freaking sweet! Instantly the new standard for our meetings.
Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
221–230 of 255 posts
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#222They're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover breadsticks. Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.
I tried using Zoom's web UI yesterday and it is a disaster. Audio doesn't work at all in Firefox without an extension/plugin, and even in Chromium halfway through a meeting the audio just cut out without any warning message and didn't work until I reloaded the web page. Even Jitsi is not as hard to use as Zoom (Jitsi warns you that Firefox isn't supported, but at least it still works fine). Zoom's terrible UI and user experience is going to push people to other services. And no I'm not installing a desktop app from a shady company on my computer.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram are all run by Facebook and have variously incompatible messaging capabilities.
Sure, but Facebook didn't name them Facebook Groupchat, Facebook Chat and Facebook Talk. People actually understand the difference between the various Facebook products, unlike the Google products.
When I ask people what Instagram is for, they always describe it as Facebook, but without all the crap. Or as Facebook with posts sorted chronologically. Doesn't make me want to sign up with it, and end up with another Facebook.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#224Google has yet to build a chat tool better than the old GChat / GoogleTalk-Gmail integration. It had voice and video (though not amazing quality, but it was 2006) and the chat was top-notch. It worked, it was integrated in my Gmail and it had text statuses which was honestly the best social media I ever used in my college days.
When they took that away it affected who I communicate with.
Same. I still miss Google Talk. It was the pinnacle of instant messaging, following and improving upon AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo which preceded it. I used it with Pidgin.
It's all been downhill from there, now that everything is just a web app and you don't have an application that can sit in your systray and open its own windows.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've used it and never noticed bad call quality and it performed pretty much very similar to Zoom. Not needing an installed app is a huge bonus.
Zoom doesn't require an app, they just hide the link to use the web version pretty well. You have to click to download the app, then cancel the download, and the link to join via browser appears.
The Zoom web app is atrocious. I've been using it these past few weeks and it's an all-around miserable experience. Google Meet is a much superior product compared to Zoom's web app.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really... You have to log out of one account, then login to the other; but then you need to use 2fa; but now 2fa is mad about something and making you jump through hoops while people are getting angry you aren't showing up as scheduled...
It sounds like you aren't taking advantage of browser profiles properly. I have two Google accounts, one personal and one for work, and they live in two separate Chrome profiles, both of which are always open. On MacOS the shortcut for switching between the two windows (when both are open) is command-`
That's totally missing the point. You shouldn't have to have browser profiles to call somebody on a video app. Most people don't even know how to use them.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here. 1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible. 2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also t…
1) Is it really? Slack already has chat, and 1-1 calls. I don't see a huge UX leap to expand 1-1 calls to big meetings. 2) So what? If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings. That's just UI at that point. 3) This makes sense and is probably the main reason hangouts failed. However, I wonder if they could have multiple sub-products under the hangouts umb…
> If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings.
Unfortunately not. A framework for large video meetings is necessarily routed through a central server which can add tremendous latency, even between two people near each other.
The architecture for 1-1 meetings tends to be peer-to-peer and focus on minimizing latency.
There are a lot of architecture tradeoffs between the different models. Choosing an optimal architecture for each product turns out to be quite necessary.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#228Earlier 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.…
Pretty sure the time between reauthentications is configured by your G Suite admin, so you should ask them
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#229Google's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle. Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G
Maybe if Zoom farted correctly it wouldn't be mired in bad PR about security.
Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has extremely valid market reasons. Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams. So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could neve…
And they brand everything as a "tool for everyone" so no one can tell if they are the intended demographic until after they install the app or do an hour of research. I would love to see how a branding team continues to justify this "Google $generic_word" branding model to the brass at Alphabet. People were unlikely to make "Hangout" a verb like "Zoom", and they definitely won't do that with "Meet". The only thing th…
Exactly, I can already create a Hangouts video call and share a link to invite others into the call. Doesn't make sense to create an entirely new service for this use case when Hangouts was designed for it (plus the new service will have a 60 minute limitation for free accounts). I agree with what GP said about Hangouts being a zombie product, but while there may be some valid market reasons for the product fragmentation, that fragmentation is also probably hurting them more than it's helping.