Gadgetory

almost a decade ago Google launched Google Talk and it really seemed like they had a head start in the messaging game but a few years later everyone from the smallest start up to its biggest corporate competitor has a mobile messaging app and Google doesn't today Google's finally throwing his hat in the ring with a new version of hangouts a multi-platform messaging app we started thinking about the problem you know almost seven years ago with Google Talk Google Talk was designed to enable you know chat within enterprises and and then we realized that there's opportunities in voice so we released Google Voice and more recently released Google+ messenger and Google Hangouts since 2005 Google has launched a steady stream of real-time communication apps like talk voice and wave most recently the company launched Google+ messenger and live video hangouts I think we've done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here I think that Google has lots and lots of we have all the code to make a seamless communication experience for end users but they live in lots of different products we're gonna fix that when you look at a problem this scope at a human level that even starts at cultural levels you can imagine that the team's the infrastructure the culture the way they think about problems are are pretty different and so what we've essentially had to do is create like it's like the Avengers we had to pull together these different styles and these different cultures and this sounds obvious in retrospect but in reality we realized that we build a lot of the communication products and without smartphones without social networks if we had to essentially rebuild everything and so we pulled the project together we called it Babel which we're launching today as hangouts it's a new experience that really is a single unified communication product across our properties hangouts is like Google Talk but your conversations are synced between every platform you use like Chrome Android iOS and Gmail where it's pretty much how you'd expect it to hangouts intelligently decide so you're most likely to chat with and puts them in easy access boxes in a sidebar once you've started a conversation you can scroll back in time to the very beginning even view an album if every photo you shared inside Google+ tiny watermarks indicate how far each member of a conversation is read and whether they're currently typing or online a button at the top of each conversation lets you instantly start a live hangout with the person or group you're chatting with no matter what device they're on neither what do you think of the spaceship you can attach photos and pick from 850 hand-drawn emojis one smart feature on Android is that when you open up hangouts on a computer or phone to talk to friends push notifications disappear on your other devices eliminating redundant notifications well the new hangouts doesn't include every feature its competitors have added like voice memos locations or stickers in our experience it's fast and is a solid version 1.0 our intention is that we will essentially replace all of our communication properties with hangouts so one thing that we've learned on hangout service or in the past year and a half since we launched is that people really love video calling David sushi bar here I would hope so so I can say you know like hey Ben and Randall are you guys around you guys free and I can see sort of when they arrive right like I can see that they're here and they're listening and they're ready and it's just one click and all of them are arranged was it always a plan from the start for video to be a big part of the text experience as well I think we knew that we wanted this to be more than just a messaging product right like we you don't see hangouts as a messaging product we see it as a communication product and we had this really great video infrastructure that a lot of people loved right everyone says I love hangouts but it's really hard and so we knew that we needed to collide these two things together I guess my next question is what do you guys think of chat heads it mean it's great right like like chat heads I think was you know super interesting they did a you know really good job with the design and how they built it yeah you know it follows some of the same principle that we talked about with the chrome chrome app right it's the ability to take your conversations with you you know regardless of what you're doing in their case it's on mobile but in our case it's the same principle you know I can be on YouTube watching a video decoding and and I didn't incoming message or call and it's about bringing that up to the foreground the hangouts is you know it's an app but you do dig into Android a bit did you consider trying to do something that felt a bit more integrated like why is this separate from say the SMS app I think you know we have a lot of good ideas that I think we're gonna you know potentially start pushing those limits and I think you know as a as a baseline for what we what we have right now I think you know we've achieved something that I think will work for a lot of people and I think is gonna work really well and there's a whole other area of things that we want to do to kind of accomplish an even better integrated product with Android you can sign in to talk from any number of clients like messages on Mac or adium or what have you is hangouts open in that way so hangouts is not built on top of the XMPP standard because we continue to maintain talk for the foreseeable future the users will continue to be able to connect into talk we have essentially made a hard decision to focus less on the XMPP standards and more on what our users are looking for and and we'll be moving hangouts forward with a platform eventually but likely not based on XMPP standard moving away from the XMPP standard means that Google Talk users won't be able to get hangouts advanced features and apps like trillion and ATM but leaving the standard gives one important thing to Google the ability to be competitive again in the quickly evolving messaging landscape is Google committed to this product long term you guys have gotten maybe a bad rap that jumps up if you've done some spring cleaning and killed off some products and we've seen a bunch of sort of experimental stuff come and then go is this in that category I think that or should I be thinking about this is a core product of Google my usual think about it as a core product in fact this is probably the strongest signal that we can give is the fact that we are releasing it on all of our properties and making a commitment going forward that hangouts is the single communication app that we want our users to essentially rely on there's no way to ask this nicely at all ask it's not nicely what took so long is there something that made this possible now in 2013 that you didn't have before it wasn't a lack of code and it wasn't a lack of understanding the problem it was easy for us to make incremental changes on Google+ or on Android or on Gmail but they weren't enough and that's when we took the time to build this project and essentially come out with you know what we're excited about but it's only the beginning we feel so yeah hangouts are good you're a Google user you're going to give them a try if you're not you still might want to because the video chat features but the bottom line is we still live in a world where some people are on iMessage some people are on bbm some people are on whatsapp and now some people are on hangouts if you want to give up on SMS there's no shortage of ways to make that happen you just need to make sure that your friends are doing it in the exact same way