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Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#72Oh yay, more chat apps from Google. I had finally hit a nice point of integration: using Hangouts with Project Fi means I got somewhat close to the iMessage experience (at least as far as being able to send/receive SMS from my computer). Clearly the integration wasn't great, and the Hangouts app is badly in need of work, but it's a shame to see that even that limited functionality is going away in favor of more fragm…
The new Google Voice app is a relatively good experience, unified across web/mobile platforms.
Except somehow they managed to completely hide the "make a phone call" button on the web - which is pretty much the most important use case. So, first thing I do is go to the "legacy Google Voice" menu item; it re-loads the page and there's my old friend...
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#73I gave up on most Google instant messaging some years ago when the stories appeared about how enabling Hangouts was somewhat of a one-way process, with many people complaining about their existing functionality being hosed in one or another fashion. (E.g. Hangouts wants to take over SMS responsibilities, but borks them.)
Google Voice languished, with message forwarding sometimes taking many minutes or even a few hours. Then this year, a new Voice push of some sort was announced, and now message forwarding is mostly back to nearly instantaneous.
One fucking product, Google. That works. Fine, add new functionality to it, but don't make me keep chasing down and and installing new apps, wondering whether and how this integrates with what I already have and what is going to get hosed. (By the way, do you guys ever try to use your public help pages, yourself? Hahaha...)
So, that little sidebar in Gmail? I'll still use that, when it happens to work and to be convenient. I recently used Hangouts -- setting up an entire account under my domain for the other party -- in a case where Skype had proved to be crap in terms of quality and holding the connection (what they typically use, and what I've refused to use since moving to a new machine).
That's about it, for my current Google IM-ish experience.
Gmail, I use. Calendar, I use. Docs, I use. They change -- I can keep up with this.
Pick a name, and a front door, and leave that the fuck alone. Your schizophrenic branding -- and sometimes dueling functionality -- is not doing you any good, here.
Cheers.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#74Poe's Law as applied to enterprise messaging platforms. Dear Google, Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform with third party integrations. The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your branding even fu…
This is spot on. TONS of people are using Slack in their personal lives because it's a good chat app. It doesn't matter if it was originally built to support business teams.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#75Google Cloud Next '17... introducing products that will go live in '18 and be shuttered in '20. Our company is evaluating team collaboration products right now. I told them not to even look at hangouts because you couldn't trust Google to keep a product alive. This was two days ago...
But remember that most of the better team collaboration tools are paid and Hangouts is free and works good.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#76Poe's Law as applied to enterprise messaging platforms. Dear Google, Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform with third party integrations. The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your branding even fu…
Monolithic apps suffer from design for the least common denominator. Business team chat and calling/texting your friend are entirely different problems and deserve different solutions.
I would suggest you check out Discord, which works well for both the team and individual use cases in one user interface. The way they accomplish this is by having "Friends" (a familiar analogy for anyone who has used chat applications from the 2000s and current social media) as well as "Servers", which are akin to teams.
Joining servers is very easy, creating servers - they are perhaps inaccurately named - is instantaneous, and each server can contain groups, voice and text channels. Adding friends is easy, and from the friends menu it's easy to message or begin a call with anyone and create ad hoc group chats and calls.
Perhaps your belief that they are entirely different problems and necessitate different solutions is based in the fact that they the market has thus far assumed that to be true.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#77Oh yay, more chat apps from Google. I had finally hit a nice point of integration: using Hangouts with Project Fi means I got somewhat close to the iMessage experience (at least as far as being able to send/receive SMS from my computer). Clearly the integration wasn't great, and the Hangouts app is badly in need of work, but it's a shame to see that even that limited functionality is going away in favor of more fragm…
The new Google Voice app is a relatively good experience, unified across web/mobile platforms.
Is there a way to route hangout messages to Google Voice?
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#78Poe's Law as applied to enterprise messaging platforms. Dear Google, Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform with third party integrations. The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your branding even fu…
> I have a friend on Android, I have an iPhone, how do I message them? What's your best solution. What if I want to switch from messaging to voice?
Install hangouts on the iphone. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
Or you can have your friend install iMessage on the android. Wait apple doesn't port it's apps to android? I'm stunned.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#79Yes Google's chat strategy is a mess, but this part is great news: > It’s a full rewrite of the Hangouts meeting experience and will work without any plug-ins (and Google also promises that it will be lighter on the processor, too, and won’t eat into your battery life or make your laptop’s fans spin at full speed). The team also cut down on the code size and promises that meetings will load “instantly.” Our team span…
This! And I hope that they fix the "calling now" issue. I still don't get why they did not make a small desktop app and voice only calling to destroy Skype. So much potential wasted.
Re: Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet
#80Poe's Law as applied to enterprise messaging platforms. Dear Google, Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform with third party integrations. The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your branding even fu…
Monolithic apps suffer from design for the least common denominator. Business team chat and calling/texting your friend are entirely different problems and deserve different solutions.
But Google doesn't segment their chat products based on target market, they segment it based on business unit. Google is just really unafraid of competing with Google in the marketplace, apparently.