Google Hangouts

https://hangouts.google.com/

by Coxa • 11 years ago

67 71 11 years ago

hangouts.google.com

dauoalagio• 11 years ago

Sure, it looks fine. Would love SMS integration though

ljk• 11 years ago

and picture messaging too

rp1229• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but that is a considerable amount of wasted space (Hi, rp1229! Get started by calling or messaging a friend below). I thought my messages would show up there, but nope, they just show up on the bottom similar to other Google sites.

barosl• 11 years ago

I've always wondered why there is no dedicated Hangouts website. I always had to choose between Gmail and Google Plus to send a message. This may have been a way to encourage the uses of their other services? Anyways, finally they made a reasonable choice.

The chat window looks still elementary, though. I expected it to expand to fit the browser window. But it is still the tiny one that can be seen in Gmail and Google Plus, which is a bit annoying to use.

joenathan• 11 years ago

Is it just me or do the three dots on the lower left do the same thing as the hamburger menu at the top?

linkydinkandyou2• 11 years ago

It looks exactly the same for me, too.

gomox8• 11 years ago

It's just the UX guys at Google acknowledging this article from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061

Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0].

I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy, redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and focuses on the newly-displayed search box.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

sssilver2• 11 years ago

Google's UX/design now reminds of MSN/Hotmail/Yahoo of 10 years ago. All the pointless image-heavy neutral visual noise. Why on earth are you showing me that waterfall background? I don't want your watered down elevator music.

Google needs to remember why Gmail, Reader, etc ended up destroying the aforementioned products in terms of UX, and change the direction it's headed at.

rsuelzer• 11 years ago

Gmail has by far the work UX out of any of the popular applications I use. It's an eye sore.

gomox8• 11 years ago

I don't think GMail is pretty, but it's very functional. Good UX != visual beauty.

As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of appreciation for GMail.

Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a (conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want.

The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.

sssilver2• 11 years ago

I actually agree, if you mean the present Gmail. I referred to the original Gmail.

JoshMnem4• 11 years ago

Google has some of the worst UIs in the tech industry. Materials Design is not good. Google Plus is so bloated with JS that it wouldn't run on my netbook with 4 Gb of RAM. The animations and "cute" easings make me feel uncomfortable whenever I open a Google product. Gmail is only tolerable when loaded through Thunderbird.

Google does well when they stick to the Craig's List school of graphic design. If G+ looked like Craig's List and had a good API, it would have done much better. One of their mistakes is that they are trying to be innovative in an area that they have never been good at (design). It would be better to be very conservative with design and focus on being innovative in their strong areas (e.g., data).

Constructive feedback: get rid of the animations, stop cropping profile photos into circles, and go much lighter on the JavaScript, abandon Materials Design and model everything off the Google homepage: think "information not animation."

xfr2• 11 years ago

Sweet, now I don't have to keep Chrome around for Hangouts on OS X.

deanstag2• 11 years ago

i dont see an option for OSX hangouts. Where did you get it?

rodion_89• 11 years ago

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahada...

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

Are you being sarcastic?

This is the same, rudimentary "interface" that has always worked in all the browsers. :/

xfr2• 11 years ago

I used to use the Hangouts Chrome app but I will be using this now instead.

linkydinkandyou2• 11 years ago

Ok, I'm game! Join me:

https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf...

I've always wondered why it was so friggin' hard to start a hangout.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

It still requires a proprietary NPAPI plugin on Firefox, sadly.

AustinG08• 11 years ago

Just wanted to chime in that I strongly dislike the new facelift to hangouts for Android. Loading images in the chat cause it to stutter pretty hard on my Nexus 5.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

Wow.... I got excited for finally a single place to go for hangouts (I was always confused at the best "launch point") and a better interface (chat on gmail hasn't changed in what feels like a decade) and lo and behold... It's a pretty launch interface but the SAME CRAPPY CHAT WINDOWS... I've always felt like hangouts was a horribly mismanaged product (starting and joining a hangout has always been a longer and more difficult process than it should) and this just confirms it.

There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).

jefftchan• 11 years ago

Totally agree. See Facebook's messenger.com for a similar thing, done much better.

mintplant• 11 years ago

What exactly is wrong with the Hangouts UI? Admittedly I've only used it a few times, but it's always seemed leagues ahead of the unusable mess that Skype has become.

gomox8• 11 years ago

The complaint is not usually about the in-videoconference UI, but about the general product and overall confusing portfolio of applications that exist under the Hangouts moniker.

There's the Android app which replaced GTalk, which also does (or used to do?) SMS, this new thing, the Google+ builtin UI, and a few others (what's the successor to the GTalk Windows app?).

I have been in Hangouts-on-air sessions were I had to intervene to send a proper link to a guest because the hosts could not figure it out.

Your question right here appears to be evidence of that: I don't even know which UI I should criticize for you as I'm not sure we are even talking about the same product.

In-videoconference, I think they are on-par or slightly ahead of Skype after the latter's update (it used to be much worse). Some things are better (warns you that you are muted if it hears you speaking while muted) and some are worse (in-videoconference text messages exist in a weird limbo that only lasts the duration of the Hangout, and have no history tracking).

In my opinion, it's the general "contact list"/"IM product" UI that is a bigger mess. My Hangouts app on Android keeps getting "unread" Hangout sessions from videoconference sessions I did on my computer. I sometimes get Hangout invites on my phone, sometimes on G+ and sometimes over e-mail (?). I think this aspect is what the OP was talking about when speaking about the lost opportunity. The general experience for a Hangouts-the-IM-product user is still very confusing.

gomox8• 11 years ago

Here's how to do a hangout quickly:

1) Put https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/ on your web browser bookmark bar

2) Upon need, click on that, wait for URL to change, and then send resulting URL over $IM_SYSTEM_OF_CHOICE

Best UI I've found so far to what I think is a pretty stellar video/voice communication product. Now if they would only fix hardware acceleration on Mac...

gkop2• 11 years ago

Sadly, that doesn't let you create a Hangout on Air. Hangouts on Air would be an absolutely killer feature if only it worked reliably :(

fluidcruft2• 11 years ago

Ugh. Chrome only.

blhack• 11 years ago

There is a chrome app that I use for hangouts that seems pretty perfect to me.

JoshMnem4• 11 years ago

Starting a hangout often works for me, but I rarely get notification messages. Sometimes it takes half an hour or more to get a notification that was sent by someone in the same room. I switched to SMS for IMs, because people don't get the Hangouts messages reliably.

Hangouts could be good, but it's awful at the moment. I wish they had at least kept the XMPP integration. I strongly suspect that Google would be more successful if they went back to a more open approach. If they had backed Diaspora rather than creating Google Plus, it would now be huge. Google Plus didn't even have a decent API. I have a lot of ideas on how to salvage it, but no one at Google has ever responded to my suggestions.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

In the list of unreliable messaging, Skype Android app has been nicely random in how it notifies me too. I can never know if someone talked or not. They keep changing the UI though, how touching.

ps: I believe all your points on xmpp/diaspora are right, and that's how Google got popular, bringing good product (mail, maps) for free. Not trying to invent a whole G paradigm because Jobs said 'focus' in an Apple keynote.

amlgsmsn• 11 years ago

What is this post about? This is what I get on clicking the "article" link with the latest version of Opera:

It appears as if you’re using an old or uncommon browser that doesn’t support common standards.
To access Hangouts, upgrade to the latest version of any of the following browsers:
Download Chrome Download Firefox Download Internet Explorer

Web standards, they said.

sheepdestroyer• 11 years ago

still no way to sort online, away and offline contacts like the old tried and proved chat interface. Pass

lechevalierd3on• 11 years ago

It does not compete well with messenger.com

jesalg• 11 years ago

On a side note, I don't get why Hangouts Dialer has to be a separate app from Hangouts in Android

fluidcruft2• 11 years ago

So that carriers can blacklist it.

zhuxuefeng1994• 11 years ago

The UI design is terrible. There are two sets of buttons to perform exactly same action.

gomox8• 11 years ago

That's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it clean.

In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.

The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.

jtchang• 11 years ago

Does anyone else have video hangouts cause Mac OS X to completely go jet turbine 100% cpu usage?

geofft3• 11 years ago

This might actually be slower than my current solution for hangouts, which is to open an empty circle in Google+. (If I open the Google+ home page, I see lots of social feed activity that a) I don't care about and b) takes a while to load.)

I'm often behind a slow public-wifi network and restricted on battery, so the amount of bandwidth and CPU used just to get me to text chat is actively a problem. I miss the XMPP days.

AceJohnny22• 11 years ago

I mean the XMPP days.

oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack. Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1]

Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using an unofficial client.

[1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.

geofft3• 11 years ago

oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

I ran my XMPP client on a UNIX server, to which I connect using mosh. As it happens, I tend to have this mosh connection open all the time to do actual work, so there's no additional overhead from running an XMPP client remotely.

(Still, there's no particular reason that a persistent though quiet TCP connection needs to drain battery any more than any approach; a TCP connection can stay open indefinitely without traffic if nothing in between the applications decides to time it out.

There might be complications on actual mobile platforms like phones, if your platform's push notification system does abstraction-crossing magic with the cell networks, such that you can shut down your data connection entirely until it needs to be woken up. But my use case is a laptop, so a constant IP connection is assumed.)

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

Um, TCP connections are totally silent when idle, save for application level heartbeats. And how would you implement a protocol with push notifications without TCP?

It's true that mobile push services exist to save power - they do this by maintaining only one heartbeat, for the most part. But it's not a huge win, and it could be added to XMPP. I don't see how protobufs help this situation at all.

kethinov• 11 years ago

Two things:

1. Bundle this into an NW.js app and we've finally got a Hangouts desktop app at long last!

2. Those tiny chat windows are a usability disaster. Come on. Take a cue from messenger.com!

intsunny• 11 years ago

With gchat I can see who is on an android device, and who is idle (even both). Can't with hangouts, why is that? Why give end users even less information?

bgentry• 11 years ago

Nicer interface, but have they done anything about power consumption? Would like to be able to run a 30 minute hangout without completely draining the battery on my Macbook Pro.

gomox8• 11 years ago

I gave you an issue-tracker-spirited upvote for this. Pretty much the only reason I still put up with Skype.

sbuttgereit2• 11 years ago

On Windows 10, still fails to respect both Hangout's own sound settings for speaker/mic as well as the Windows configured default communication device. So while I like this interface better, any number of other services I use (e.g. Zoom, Skype) just work better with my devices. Those other services can switch to using my bluetooth headset on calls and similar.

Google really is a technology company, not a products company. They have some really very clever ideas and implement them with great mediocrity more often than they should. And even when they get something solid, you can never really tell for how long the product will last or if they'll start screwing with it.

For me, the only things that really come to mind as solid are maps and search. Google Now, great... if you don't have a Google Apps account. Inbox, great... if you don't need a bit slightly sophisticated formatting or image support. etc.

mmmpie• 11 years ago

Are you using chrome? I ran into the same issue (wouldn't respect audio settings) plus it burned 100% cup on all four cores and the audio kept breaking up. It turns out that IE 10 is good for something! Not only do the hangout plugin audio settings work but the sound itself works (no more disrupted streams) and cpu hangs out around 50% across 4 cores. Much better!

sbuttgereit2• 11 years ago

Yep. Using Chrome. I don't see the high CPU or the audio issues aside from respecting the settings though. Maybe I should give the other browsers a try! Thx!

rekoros• 11 years ago

Ha. We just added the Hangouts interop gateway to Sameroom (https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...)

niuzeta• 11 years ago

I'm confused. Shouldn't the large space on right be where the IM window was supposed to pop in? Is it just a launch interface for already-available hangout app?

thekevan• 11 years ago

I have the browser extension Disconnect enabled, and it stops that page from functioning.

taf2• 11 years ago

Anyone else getting a 500 error?

All I see when I visit is

500. That’s an error.

There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.

saurik• 11 years ago

That is also all that I am getting.

lists• 11 years ago

Is that the Gmail UI re-themed?

bfrog• 11 years ago

Am I the only one that longs for what used to be the awesomeness that is gchat?

Gchat with what hangouts has for calls/voice/video would've basically been the win. Instead it constantly feels like this buggy/gimped browser app that maybe/maybe doesn't work.

fwn• 11 years ago

It is perfect.

The most annoying problem with Hangouts is that I have to load the whole Gmail tab for answering a single message on my laptop. This tool is a lot faster. I zoomed to 125%, adblocked the bing background image & the now cropped giant greeting.

Google Hangouts

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