Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs

https://varun.ch/hangouts

by varun_ch • 4 years ago

123 66 4 years ago

varun.ch

gondo• 4 years ago

Anjali most likely refers to 'Añjali_Mudrā' [0] instead of the person's name.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Añjali_Mudrā

varun_ch2• 4 years ago

Ah that makes a lot more sense. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks.

kwijibob• 4 years ago

RIP hangouts. My family chat for many years.

graderjs3• 4 years ago

Me too! Please don't leave, Hangouts!

sundvor• 4 years ago

Well over a decade in my case. The new chat is an exercise in frustration.

My favourite bug (on Android) is when you paste a URL, hit enter to send, then start typing your message related to the URL. Because it wants to process the URL, look it up for a preview, it doesn't send straight away. However when it does, it also includes your absolutely not submitted and presently in draft stage beginnings of your next message.

Unreal.

tramtrist• 4 years ago

Unreal indeed. I set up my wife's elderly parents in Japan with Hangouts years ago so we could video call them by actually.. you know.. hitting the 'call' button to ring their computer. This worked seamlessly for years with no effort on their part. When the computer 'rang' they knew to click answer. After hearing that hangouts was going away (what is it like 3 times that's been delayed?) I moved them to Google Chat but boy was that a mistake. You cannot 'ring' the other caller anymore and have to set up a meeting for each call. Or you have to set up a perpetual meeting which they can always go in to. This has caused us to miss many video calls and constant frustration for my wife trying to explain to them how to use that function. Why in the world does Google remove features in new solutions when they deprecate an old one? Can't they simply make a list of things that work in the old app and check them off in the new one? I realize zoom is all trendy now but geez...

Shoulda just stuck with Skype or something else.

thfuran• 4 years ago

RIP Google Talk

encryptluks22• 4 years ago

I'm surprised they are telling people to switch, when I still get a message saying my Jangouts older than a year won't show up in Google Chat. I've noticed that most of them show up but not all of them. One thing I loved about Hangouts was the chat folder in Gmail that showed my chat history. I wish they did something similar with Google Voice. I wonder how long it will be before they try combining Voice and Google Chat.

graderjs3• 4 years ago

I love the Hangouts animated stickers...I really wish Hangouts (and all its Easter eggs) would stay

encryptluks22• 4 years ago

I honestly prefer the Google Chat app because it includes functionality Hangouts lacked, like search and dark mode.

edent• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm getting old - but how do people remember all these switches and commands? They aren't intentionally discoverable, there's no UI to see them, and there's no explanation of what they do.

tentacleuno• 4 years ago

They aren't intentionally discoverable because they aren't meant to be, they're easter eggs :)

jpswade• 4 years ago

Hangouts was great, used xmpp in the beginning and was available on most devices so would work across android, iOS, blackberry, Mac, windows and web. They screwed it up and WhatsApp won.

lotsofpulp4• 4 years ago

WhatsApp won because it used phone number as login and SMS messages as the authentication, automatically copy and pasted from the SMS without the user even knowing, ensuring a spam free network with zero friction to “log in”.

I remember thinking how genius and novel the approach was, and all the people in my family, even the old, non English speaking, non computer literate people immediately knew how to use it. All you had to do was point people to the app, and they needed no more hand holding.

Of course, it was also a great cross platform user experience, and came about at the exact time mobile phones were blowing up, but I think the differentiating factor was the extreme ease of sign in, in combo with that same mechanism cutting spam made it an obvious choice. Just logging into software with username and password was a big UI hurdle back then for the older people in my family, and probably still is.

I specifically remember one use case that WhatsApp fixed and that google/apple/Microsoft had no answer for. Sharing contacts. It was so hard to share contacts with non tech literate people, and I do not know why all the other messengers by the big companies could not do it, but WhatsApp made it dead easy to send and receive properly formatted contact information.

beebeepka2• 4 years ago

I specifically avoided it because the whole "no authentication" thing smelled funny to me. Still don't feel using MSISDN is right.

Everyone around me loved it, though, so the joke was, once again, on me. How come almost nothing I like is popular. And vice versa

kalleboo• 4 years ago

There must be more to it than that, since here in Japan LINE is wildly popular (similarly among the elderly etc who are typically not expected to adopt new technology) and it does not use phone numbers as an ID (well it does, as an option, but that opens you up to spam so nobody uses it)

RuggedPineapple2• 4 years ago

I hear this all the time, but I have never in my life met a single whatsapp user. Is this one of those things thats huge outside the US?

kettleballroll• 4 years ago

It is huge in Central Europe at least. Pretty much everyone is on it, you would be left out of a lot of functions if you didn't have access to it (eg my kids childcare has its parents' chat groups there, my building block has a group there. In online dating, asking for a number to move the discussion to Whatsapp is pretty common... Heck, last time I brought my bike into the repair shop, they asked me if it was okay if they sent me the status report via Whatsapp).

To be fair though, while Whatsapp is the default messenger for pretty much everyone, both signal and telegram also have their users, especially with younger people. Eg the volunteers for helping the Ukrainian refugees in my city organize via telegram, and the above-mentioned bikeshop ended up messaging me via Signal.

laurent123456• 4 years ago

It's the opposite in the UK. I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't use WhatsApp.

Macha2• 4 years ago

Yes. Similarly I hear a lot about iMessage, but in my country (Ireland) no one I know uses it. Whatsapp pretty much supplanted SMS, FB Messenger, Viber (which had a good early start here) and was dominant enough that it basically left iMessage, Signal and Telegram with no way to gain ground here.

gman83• 4 years ago

I moved from Hangouts to Google Chat and so far it's been pretty seamless. What I like about it compared to WhatsApp is how easy it is to use across devices... phone, tablet, web. No messing about with QR codes, etc.

drdec• 4 years ago

For some reason on Android there's a Google Chat app, but Google tries to shuttle you into using Chat from within the GMail app for whatever reason.

kyrra2• 4 years ago

Googler opinions are my own.

I think they're making Gmail their collaboration/communication software. You have email, chat, and meet all in there.

I agree, I don't totally understand why they're doing it. That's my best guess.

puttycat• 4 years ago

I’ve been using Gmail for about 15 years now, with the chat widget on the left active most of that time. For years, before mobile messaging became ubiquitous, it was my main communication channel with friends.

The widget has changed over the years, getting less and less handy and intuitive, for no apparent reason.

I would say that I’m an advanced user, to say the least, and I still have no idea what is the difference between Gtalk, Hangouts, Meet, and Chat (which is apparently the newest?).

What a mess.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

I block all of chat / hangouts / whatever via ublock origin. I use gmail for email only, I consider the chat client to be bloat.

cj• 4 years ago

Chat/Meet in gmail can also be turned off in gmail settings.

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

Does that actually stop Gmail from making the requests or is it just cosmetic only?

LegitShady• 4 years ago

tbe ubiquity of mobile messaging predates google hangouts by a lot.

joshvm• 4 years ago

Canonically you should be using Meet and Chats. These both evolved from Hangouts, though I think GMail Chat and Chats are interoperable. You can think of them as Slack and Zoom targeted towards people who have already bought into GSuite which makes sense from an org perspective, though both are usable with free accounts. Meet added features more aligned with what people expect from modern conferencing platforms (large audience casting, recordings, etc). Chat has a way to go before it uproots Slack I think, but it offers most of the same features for in-domain messaging.

I've been very happy with Meet, aside from some browser quirks (blur is not available outside Chrome). It's very easy to create a new meeting and it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar.

GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.

lima• 4 years ago

It does seem they finally figured it out.

Chat and Meet are decent, and most importantly, they're the only messaging products now.

wffurr2• 4 years ago

> GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.

And yet they still run the XMPP servers, though not in a way that's usable as chat. They used the same XMPP servers as GTalk for Cloud Print, for some reason. And now if they turn those servers off, a whole lot of printers with faulty back off logic will start trying to DDoS the data centers.

Cheapest thing to do is apparently to just keep running the servers.

samizdis• 4 years ago

There was an article in ArsTechnica last August - A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps [1] - that documented Google's history of messaging/chat clients. It's a sobering read.

It was posted on HN and generated 80 comments [2].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727

londons_explore• 4 years ago

Seeing this tells me there was probably a passionate and creative team behind Hangouts as a product. That's quite in contrast to the buggy slow product that it was to use, and the lack of market success it saw.

criddell• 4 years ago

Maybe they were passionate and creative but also not very good at software development?

phgn• 4 years ago

I would have loved some screenshots of these easter eggs in action. I don't have anyone to message on Google Hangouts to test this out.

kyrra2• 4 years ago

Googler opinions are my own.

If you search around the internet, you can find some full screenshots of it as people discovered the features.

https://www.techjunkie.com/google-hangouts-easter-eggs/

Many of the commands that exist, are effectively just text replacement where you swap out some / command for a string that is an emoji like thing, such as: /tableflip

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

The above was actually added to hangouts by a coworker long ago when there weren't as many Easter egg commands (and we worked in payments at that time). The fun of having a fully open codebase, where you can edit and propose changes to anyone's code, you just have to convince them to approve it.

Though I will add, some of the commands actually had animated pictures with them, such as /shydino and /corgis.

oceliker• 4 years ago

I miss the Facebook chat from the late '00s - early '10s, which also had easter eggs. The only one I remember is :putnam: which showed a face of a person (presumably named Putnam). I wish FAANG companies still did easter eggs.

kevinventullo• 4 years ago

I worked on Facebook maps from 2018-2021.

Zoom in on the lat-lon (0.0,0.0) for a more recent Easter egg :)

throwra620• 4 years ago

Someone summarise this for me please.

blamazon• 4 years ago

Google hangouts is going away because Google is making yet another chat product. There are Easter eggs in Google hangouts. You can find them by looking at JavaScript.

csours• 4 years ago

Killing Google Hangouts is a huge FUCK YOU to Google users. I'm sure people at Google have heard this, and they have other priorities; aka they don't care that they are fucking their userbase. I'm quite sure there are technical reasons to kill it, but I feel like the real reason is that Google simply doesn't want to do any thing that is not currently scaling up. I'm sure their cost structure cannot support products that aren't growing. I'm sure their culture of career advancement means that no engineer wants to be on the Hangouts team. I'm sure that NONE OF THAT MATTERS TO USERS.

takeda2• 4 years ago

Same plan is with e-mail. Run gmail until it's not feasible anymore to use anything else than gmail (you can have SMTP server with 10+ years, that never sent a spam, not listed on any spam blocks, have correctly configured SPF, DKIM but still put its mail to spam).

Once no one will run their SMTP gmail will be similarly killed using the Microsoft's EEE aproach.

They do this over and over again (even the Hangouts essentially killed XMPP). Fuck the cancer that is google. They are actually destroying what Internet was meant to be.

jhoechtl• 4 years ago

Like seven, eight? years ago, Hangouts was everywhere. Maybe it was just the communities I dabbled in. Nowadays I actually wonder that it still there. Weren't there some other google IM efforts in between? A tell-tale of how to loose big.

takeda2• 4 years ago

Wasn't Google Chat (which also was inter-operating with XMPP) that was replaced by Hangouts?

tgsovlerkhgsel• 4 years ago

Here's the list of the text replacements from the post:

https://pastebin.com/raw/2CG1Cdn6

(HN filters most of the emoji making it pointless to paste here)

vmurthy• 4 years ago

@varun_ch : Great going! I saw your "About" [0] page and you are only 15! Awesome time to be learning and finding more about code. On a side note, I feel old :(

[0]https://varun.ch/#projects

varun_ch2• 4 years ago

Thank you! :)

Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs

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