[lotso]

I still use Gchat over Hangouts because it's nice seeing my contacts list sorted by who is online, as opposed being ordered by recency of last communication.

So many of my Gchat conversations have started because of the online status. I've hit up friends that I haven't talked to in over a year and had really great, synchronous, conversations because of it.

[mtgx]

I remember there was a rather big outrage when Google first released Hangouts and it showed everyone as online all the time. Eventually, they made it so you only show-up as online if you've been in the window in the past 15 minutes. But they're still not ordering the contacts by online status. This is just one more of those "social" things that Google has never been able to grasp.

[TorKlingberg]

"online" as a concept has become a bit meaningless with mobile clients.

[cptskippy]

This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way.

People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with people you didn't log into your IM client, if you wanted to chat with someone specifically there was a first class UI element for setting your status so you could tell others to leave you alone. Email and SMS were black holes where you only knew if your message was received via a response.

Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM someone. Read receipts are standard so you know if someone got your message. If someone's phone rings while you're eating, you're lucky if they apologize before answering, and you've won the lottery if they excuse themselves from the table.

It seems like we're all just sitting around waiting for an interruption to distract us from the life in front of us.

Idk... you damn kids need to get off my lawn.

[jrullman]

It sounds like that will continue to be possible — "Third-party XMPP clients will continue to work with Hangouts for 1-on-1 chats."