I have 1 Gmail account and 2 Google Apps accounts. I use Gtalk and have G+ configured on the Gmail, and 1 domain has Gtalk enabled and G+ disabled, and the other has both disabled.
This morning I installed Hangouts on my Android as I read the press about how this would replace Gtalk and figured I should get used to the interface.
What is now displayed confuses me greatly.
Is this G+? How come this app is working on the domains on which it is disabled?
Is this Gtalk? How come I cannot see/find my Gtalk contacts and my native Gmail account is showing me what I recognise as circles in the place I would expect to see my Gtalk contacts.
Where are the archived chats from Gtalk? Still archived in my Gmail? If so, why does this app say I have no archived chats? Will future archived items be in my Gmail? Even for the domains in which G+ is disabled (if, as I'm currently assuming they will actually be in G+ because otherwise it would show the archived chats that are in my Gmail)?
The native Gmail seems to allow group chat, but the corporate account doesn't... why?
It asked to confirm my number, but doesn't seem to like the fact that all three accounts are 1 number... why? I am the same person, several accounts and 1 phone.
I simply don't know what Hangouts is as a product and how the various accounts I have will work or what options should be set where to make it predictable.
And just to top off the confusion, my girlfriend has clearly added the app too, as I got a confused email from her and 5 minutes later an email asking me to install Whats App.
I feel I've gone from something I knew and had control of, to something that really confuses. I've told my girlfriend to just send me an email or call me... we can both just understand that.
Is there some epiphany I'm missing?
Edit: This is in the context of someone who is very familiar with the existing/old offerings and used them a fair bit. It's the 'replacing' bit and not being able to see anything familiar or old in the new which makes it confounding.
I suspect Google's hiring process, while extraordinary for most of their purposes, is challenged at hiring those with the combination of breadth and depth of experience to prevent this problem.
They have to go outside that process to hire full stack tech + 360 degree user experience, which they only do if they pre-determined the hire (thereby bypassing the screens, interviews, and committees, which are made up of depth-first experts who naturally rate based on candidate depth within each interviewer's scope).
This selectivity problem (rejection of "Renaissance" women or men) could become increasingly apparent as their products attempt broader and more integrated reach.
On the other hand, perhaps management realizes there is an issue, as evidenced by more and more frequently reaching past their defined hiring process to poach pre-selected hires with broader expertise.
Maybe this bi-modal hiring is the answer, though their current approach misses out identifying and hiring talented prospects who aren't already valley famous yet could help address the very valid concerns buro9 raises here.
I'm missing why it's not replacing the G+ Messenger app (or maybe it is, idk). For some one who's been able to install the new Hangout app - do you also still have the Messenger app as well?
It's another huge marketing/branding failure by Google too. They expect the world to learn intimate details of all their crazy products that aren't hinted at by naming. Google loves to hijack short and extremely common words to use as opaque identifiers for products.
Examples: "Google Wave" -- meaningless unless you read about it extensively. "Circles" -- takes a while for people to realize it's actually "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time." "Google Hangouts" -- okay, "hangout" kinda works, but it feels way too casual. I don't want to "hangout" with most work people. What is it anyway? Video chat? Text chat? A Skype replacement? Mobile messaging focused? People don't really know unless they research it first.
You're not missing anything. Most if not all of your concerns were voiced during the internal dogfooding phase and, as usual for G+ and Vic Gundotra, duly noted and ignored.
We use Hangouts extensively for meetings. They've almost replaced conference calls.
Good stuff:
- Works well, even with relatively poor network conditions and people located in many continents.
- Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction.
- Doesn't crash (you'd think this would not be notable, but try Skype some time ...)
Bad stuff:
- User interface sucks. I get confused every single time I try to start a new hangout. There seem to be multiple ways to start a hangout, none of them obvious.
- Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private.
- Privacy of the whole thing is suspect (it is Google after all). The G+ plugin is incredibly invasive, to the point where I have a separate computer entirely for G+ / hangouts and I use it for nothing else.
> - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private.
Yep, so you end up making it public, then going back and downloading it, then deleting it from YouTube.
Google seems to have a fixation that everything in the universe must exist on the web -- and be accessed by typing into the Google search box. Whatever we do in life, we get back to it from that little search box.
For what it's worth, we've been using UberConference ( http://www.uberconference.com ) to do conference calls and it's been quite good. No video, though.
I just can't wait until they begin supporting the VP9 codec in it. I presume this is the main reason why they haven't launched 10-way Hangouts with 720p resolution yet. VP9 should help with that.
I'm not sure I understand why they can't even offer 720p recording for the videos, though, even if they can't do 720p streaming right now.
I think when this hits GMail in earnest there's going to be another huge outcry.
Judging by my contact list and the lists of others I see, statuses and presence are a really big deal: people use red-dot to mean "I'm here but interrupt me only if it's crucial" and green-dot to say "fire at will!".
Hangouts supports none of this, only a very simplistic "I'm actively on a device". There's no way to append "... and I'm working, so please don't interrupt unless you have to". You can mute notifications, for a preset amount of time, but that's not the same either -- it's turning off your phone rather than setting it to silent.
I guess they see this as "advanced" functionality, but judging by the people I know it isn't. They may have just copied Facebook, but Facebook messenger isn't something people leave on all day, and it also allows you to selectively block groups of chatty people until you're ready for them.
If you ask me, the Hangouts actually is a huge improvement over the old Google Talk.
I never sign into the old Talk on my gmail account because I find it very very distracting. The presumption of Talk (or other IM clients) is that if I am online, then I am willing to be interrupted to answer your message immediately. That's absolutely not the case --- if I'm working, I'll answer your message later.
The Hangouts (SMS-like) model is much more useful to me --- you can always feel free send me a message, but I will answer it when I see fit. Hangouts gives a hint as to whether I'm likely to read your message soon, but there's no promise of a synchronous response.
I think they are trying to replace text messaging. When you text someone you have no concept of their availability. If they were to add statuses, then you would never send a message to someone that was offline/away.
"Line Chat" (a smartphone IM app in Japan) became the #1 "social network" extremely quickly in Japan and its reach is slowly spreading to other countries as well. (It blew by Facebook and its mainstream acceptance is must be well beyond Twitter by now)
It seems obvious to me. SMS still lies outside of their control, and replacing it with something that goes through their servers would give them access to massive amounts of data otherwise unavailable to them.
I quite like using Line, and prefer it to WhatsApp (which most people in my contacts seem to have). My main gripe however is the lack of a browser chat option. They have a desktop client but I'd rather not have to install that just to chat at my desk. That's where Google has the edge I think.
Even if Google puts Hangouts in all the new Android OS releases, and with some upgrading it manually, they'd still be much better off buying either Whatsapp, Viber or Line, to get a solid base immediately of such "SMS alternative app" users.
I "upgraded" the talk app on my phone to hangout. It was a terrible decision, it's destroyed the primary use of my phone (using gchat while at work, on the go, etc).
It mixed my gchat and phone contacts, so now the list of contacts is a giant unusable mess. I can't see who of my friends are online. They moved the send button from being at the bottom-right of the virtual keyboard to above the keyboard next to the input text area which is awkward. I don't use google+ and yet multiple friends were "blocked in google+" and I had to unblock them.
GChat / google talk have been the primary way I've kept in touch with friends and family for years. The android talk app was perfect - intuitive, fast, simple. It provided exactly what I needed - who is online, away, busy, offline and a fast simple way to chat with them.
If this is the future for gchat, I'm going to have to try to convince friends and family to switch back to AIM or MSN Messenger.
Convince them to switch to XMPP instead. Get an account from Jabber.org, and install Pidgin or Adium. Then they can talk to anybody else with an XMPP account on any domain, which includes Google Talk users until that service gets nuked.
Unfortunately I installed Hangout on my phone this morning and basically destroyed most of the utility GTalk had. None of my Google Talk contacts can send messages to my mobile, I can't see them in my contact list (not even people with Google accounts that don't use G+) and for the remaining ones with G+ accounts there's no presence information I can recognize.
I have two google apps for domains accounts, on personal and one for work, and since the hangouts app shows your contacts, and the contacts are not strictly bound to a g-account on the phone when browsing, the contacts lists and circles are all mixed up. I'm paranoid about chatting with someone at work via my personal account and then polluting their seen-people history contact list with my personal account. This was much easier to keep separate with the gtalk app.
I may need two phones to keep this stuff separate properly.
The one thing that really annoyed me is that all my AIM contacts disappeared. Granted I only have 2 people with which I talk regularly, but one of them is pretty much my best friend, and luckily I have other venues of communication because if not I would have lost contact with him forever because Google hates me.
Yes, that pissed me off, too. The messenger is now basically the old G+ Messenger, and not Gtalk.
Also if they were going to do this, they should've done it across all Gtalk platforms at once, so nobody feels the "fragmentation" between the services. I heard it will begin being rolled out to Gmail soon, but still. It all should've happened in day one.
One thing that can really improve hangouts is eye contact.This is probably the main difference between video conferecing and the more expensive telepresence , which is replacing flights for business meetings.
While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance:
from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]":
"""
TV Set-top design
Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier
to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing
distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”.
An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will
still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the
eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should
give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦
error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error
of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the
correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may
be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance.
"""
The headline and url for this article is actually "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+"--not sure why the HN title is "Hangouts are swallowing all other Google communication clients"?
If you're going to rewrite the title, it could just as easily have been "Google attempts to unify its messaging products."
HI Matt, I'm in San Jose for the next few days and would love to meet you at an event or something? talk about spam and the up coming updates, especially since were from the other side of the world (London), are you at any events that we could meet at, were here attending the bitcoin2013 and ieee, if your interested.
The article starts by stating Google+ has not really gone anywhere. I don't use any social networks so I wouldn't know but I notice my daughters (10/12) talking about Google+ a lot (although I don't allow them to use it yet).
I'm wondering if G+ is taking off with the younger crowd since there's a logical pathway from Gmail which seems to be the mail everyone at that age uses. The same seems to be true for Google chat, which my daughters use a lot.
Original/Current article title: "Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+"
It'll be interesting how important MOOCs will be to the direction and success of Google's efforts to create a social platform.
The last time I tried out G+ was a few weeks ago, and I can't emphasize just how heinous the UI was - so heinous that I got the impression that it must have been deliberately so.
For small teams I prefer hangouts to anything else (GoToHellMeeting, WebHex, et al). They do need to make the archiving and extraction of data from hangouts into something easily consumed by mortals. Beyond its most root function (videoconferencing) its not a terribly well designed UX.
i once installed the hangouts plugin on my 2009 mac book pro, killed the webcam, complained in a help thread, no response, in the end had to reinstall the OS.... as soon as it goes all-in HTML5/getUserMedia i will try it again.
[+] [-] buro9|13 years ago|reply
I have 1 Gmail account and 2 Google Apps accounts. I use Gtalk and have G+ configured on the Gmail, and 1 domain has Gtalk enabled and G+ disabled, and the other has both disabled.
This morning I installed Hangouts on my Android as I read the press about how this would replace Gtalk and figured I should get used to the interface.
What is now displayed confuses me greatly.
Is this G+? How come this app is working on the domains on which it is disabled?
Is this Gtalk? How come I cannot see/find my Gtalk contacts and my native Gmail account is showing me what I recognise as circles in the place I would expect to see my Gtalk contacts.
Where are the archived chats from Gtalk? Still archived in my Gmail? If so, why does this app say I have no archived chats? Will future archived items be in my Gmail? Even for the domains in which G+ is disabled (if, as I'm currently assuming they will actually be in G+ because otherwise it would show the archived chats that are in my Gmail)?
The native Gmail seems to allow group chat, but the corporate account doesn't... why?
It asked to confirm my number, but doesn't seem to like the fact that all three accounts are 1 number... why? I am the same person, several accounts and 1 phone.
I simply don't know what Hangouts is as a product and how the various accounts I have will work or what options should be set where to make it predictable.
And just to top off the confusion, my girlfriend has clearly added the app too, as I got a confused email from her and 5 minutes later an email asking me to install Whats App.
I feel I've gone from something I knew and had control of, to something that really confuses. I've told my girlfriend to just send me an email or call me... we can both just understand that.
Is there some epiphany I'm missing?
Edit: This is in the context of someone who is very familiar with the existing/old offerings and used them a fair bit. It's the 'replacing' bit and not being able to see anything familiar or old in the new which makes it confounding.
[+] [-] Terretta|13 years ago|reply
They have to go outside that process to hire full stack tech + 360 degree user experience, which they only do if they pre-determined the hire (thereby bypassing the screens, interviews, and committees, which are made up of depth-first experts who naturally rate based on candidate depth within each interviewer's scope).
This selectivity problem (rejection of "Renaissance" women or men) could become increasingly apparent as their products attempt broader and more integrated reach.
On the other hand, perhaps management realizes there is an issue, as evidenced by more and more frequently reaching past their defined hiring process to poach pre-selected hires with broader expertise.
Maybe this bi-modal hiring is the answer, though their current approach misses out identifying and hiring talented prospects who aren't already valley famous yet could help address the very valid concerns buro9 raises here.
[+] [-] bgp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|13 years ago|reply
It's another huge marketing/branding failure by Google too. They expect the world to learn intimate details of all their crazy products that aren't hinted at by naming. Google loves to hijack short and extremely common words to use as opaque identifiers for products.
Examples: "Google Wave" -- meaningless unless you read about it extensively. "Circles" -- takes a while for people to realize it's actually "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time." "Google Hangouts" -- okay, "hangout" kinda works, but it feels way too casual. I don't want to "hangout" with most work people. What is it anyway? Video chat? Text chat? A Skype replacement? Mobile messaging focused? People don't really know unless they research it first.
[+] [-] bdowney|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rwmj|13 years ago|reply
Good stuff:
- Works well, even with relatively poor network conditions and people located in many continents.
- Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction.
- Doesn't crash (you'd think this would not be notable, but try Skype some time ...)
Bad stuff:
- User interface sucks. I get confused every single time I try to start a new hangout. There seem to be multiple ways to start a hangout, none of them obvious.
- Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private.
- Privacy of the whole thing is suspect (it is Google after all). The G+ plugin is incredibly invasive, to the point where I have a separate computer entirely for G+ / hangouts and I use it for nothing else.
[+] [-] deweerdt|13 years ago|reply
I agree with most of the points you've raised. In low bandwidth settings my personal experience is that skype does better sound-wise though.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
Yep, so you end up making it public, then going back and downloading it, then deleting it from YouTube.
Google seems to have a fixation that everything in the universe must exist on the web -- and be accessed by typing into the Google search box. Whatever we do in life, we get back to it from that little search box.
[+] [-] shadowfiend|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loceng|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I understand why they can't even offer 720p recording for the videos, though, even if they can't do 720p streaming right now.
[+] [-] marbletiles|13 years ago|reply
Judging by my contact list and the lists of others I see, statuses and presence are a really big deal: people use red-dot to mean "I'm here but interrupt me only if it's crucial" and green-dot to say "fire at will!".
Hangouts supports none of this, only a very simplistic "I'm actively on a device". There's no way to append "... and I'm working, so please don't interrupt unless you have to". You can mute notifications, for a preset amount of time, but that's not the same either -- it's turning off your phone rather than setting it to silent.
I guess they see this as "advanced" functionality, but judging by the people I know it isn't. They may have just copied Facebook, but Facebook messenger isn't something people leave on all day, and it also allows you to selectively block groups of chatty people until you're ready for them.
[+] [-] emu|13 years ago|reply
I never sign into the old Talk on my gmail account because I find it very very distracting. The presumption of Talk (or other IM clients) is that if I am online, then I am willing to be interrupted to answer your message immediately. That's absolutely not the case --- if I'm working, I'll answer your message later.
The Hangouts (SMS-like) model is much more useful to me --- you can always feel free send me a message, but I will answer it when I see fit. Hangouts gives a hint as to whether I'm likely to read your message soon, but there's no promise of a synchronous response.
[+] [-] MikeKusold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|13 years ago|reply
http://line.naver.jp/en/
Google+ might be onto something by focusing on "IM/chat" and other means of communication, particularly outside of the united states.
[+] [-] yock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynewwork|13 years ago|reply
It mixed my gchat and phone contacts, so now the list of contacts is a giant unusable mess. I can't see who of my friends are online. They moved the send button from being at the bottom-right of the virtual keyboard to above the keyboard next to the input text area which is awkward. I don't use google+ and yet multiple friends were "blocked in google+" and I had to unblock them.
GChat / google talk have been the primary way I've kept in touch with friends and family for years. The android talk app was perfect - intuitive, fast, simple. It provided exactly what I needed - who is online, away, busy, offline and a fast simple way to chat with them.
If this is the future for gchat, I'm going to have to try to convince friends and family to switch back to AIM or MSN Messenger.
[+] [-] gwillen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thwarted|13 years ago|reply
I may need two phones to keep this stuff separate properly.
[+] [-] rtpg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Also if they were going to do this, they should've done it across all Gtalk platforms at once, so nobody feels the "fragmentation" between the services. I heard it will begin being rolled out to Gmail soon, but still. It all should've happened in day one.
[+] [-] ippisl|13 years ago|reply
While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance:
from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]":
""" TV Set-top design Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”. An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦ error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance. """
[1]http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/... [2]https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS
[+] [-] kalleboo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matt_Cutts|13 years ago|reply
If you're going to rewrite the title, it could just as easily have been "Google attempts to unify its messaging products."
[+] [-] jayjay1010|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|13 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if G+ is taking off with the younger crowd since there's a logical pathway from Gmail which seems to be the mail everyone at that age uses. The same seems to be true for Google chat, which my daughters use a lot.
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
It'll be interesting how important MOOCs will be to the direction and success of Google's efforts to create a social platform.
The last time I tried out G+ was a few weeks ago, and I can't emphasize just how heinous the UI was - so heinous that I got the impression that it must have been deliberately so.
[+] [-] zeruch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyang|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|13 years ago|reply