Is this some way of popularizing hangouts?
Introducing Google Helpouts
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#12An interesting new avenue for Google, where the results and satisfaction are entirely subjective, according to perception of the customer. With search results or Gmail they can hand-wave away dis-satisfaction my saying the 99th percentile are happy, but this is one-on-one. I can see the Money Back Guarantee being quite a support burden. But why are Google doing this? It's not really "organizing the World's informatio…
Agreed. It may be useful but I don't see how it fits Google's overall mission; Google Answers were more relevant and they killed it (a long time ago).
Maybe the strategy is to eventually make sessions public? which would actually add value for the community.
Or it's a cheap ploy to get people to use Google+ (and if so, good luck with that).
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#13It's almost as if Google answers has been somewhat resurrected. Definitely keeping an eye on this.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#14Skype used to have something like this in 2006-ish...
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#15My kneejerk reaction is to wonder when this will go the way of Google Wave and Google Reader.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#16So this is a solution to the "problem" of people looking up how to do something on youtube, now you can ask an expert and get detailed two-way feedback.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#17An interesting new avenue for Google, where the results and satisfaction are entirely subjective, according to perception of the customer. With search results or Gmail they can hand-wave away dis-satisfaction my saying the 99th percentile are happy, but this is one-on-one. I can see the Money Back Guarantee being quite a support burden. But why are Google doing this? It's not really "organizing the World's informatio…
Agreed. It may be useful but I don't see how it fits Google's overall mission; Google Answers were more relevant and they killed it (a long time ago). Maybe the strategy is to eventually make sessions public? which would actually add value for the community. Or it's a cheap ploy to get people to use Google+ (and if so, good luck with that).
"Google Answers were more relevant and they killed it (a long time ago)."
Oh I had quite forgotten about that! Good point.
See how things used to look :)
http://answers.google.com/answers/
At least with Google Answers the information was public.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#18My kneejerk reaction is to wonder when this will go the way of Google Wave and Google Reader.
Exactly.
Mine was, "Cool; how long's this one gonna last?" It seems like a neat idea, but I bet the novelty is going to wear off pretty quickly.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#19This would help with the times I've just wanted to ask someone "so, does this shirt actually go with these pants, or am I totally crazy?" All joking aside, this could be interesting. It makes me think of that service that existed for a while where you could ask a question of a topic area, and it would send an IM to people and ask them to answer it. I forget what it was called, but I used it for a little while. The pa…
There are other services like that. I think JustAnswer is one of them.
Re: Introducing Google Helpouts
#20My initial reaction is "cool, but I won't use it as it'll be shutdown soon enough". I wonder if enough people avoid new Google products due to shutdown fears so it leads to a product ultimately being shutdown due to neglect.
A bit of a vicious cycle.