Google Hangouts' New Features Make Work Meetings Slightly Less Annoying (cnet.com)

Google is rolling out two new features in its communication and messaging app, Hangouts. From a report: (Unfortunately, neither tools help decrease the utterances of such phrases like "How will this scale?" and "Run it up the flagpole.") The first is a video conferencing feature called Hangouts Meet. Meet allows people to hop on meetings via a web link through their laptops or mobile app. This link can be shared in an email or directly through a Google Calendar invite. Colleagues who are traveling without Internet can use a dedicated dial-in phone number. The second feature is Hangouts Chat, which lets coworkers message each other in dedicated chat rooms.

Comments

GotoMeeting and webex

[gatkinso]

have had this for years.

Re:GotoMeeting and webex

[nine-times]

Yes, apparently they're repositioning Hangouts as a product. Instead of being Google's competitor to Apple's consumer-grade Facetime and Messages, they're positioning it as a business-grade competitor to WebEx and Slack.

Re:GotoMeeting and webex

[jafiwam]

Don't worry.

Google will fail to finish it or pull it out of beta and will drop the project with 2 months warning at some random time between 1 and 4 years in the future.

All is well.

Re:GotoMeeting and webex

[stephanruby]

Yes, but on a desktop computer both GoToMeeting and WebEx required you to open full sized windows before you would be able to access the associated chat room. In other words, the chat room was only secondary to the actual video/audio conferencing, and the chat room history would get reset each time there was a new meeting.

And last but not least, GoToMeeting and WebEx didn't have a super cool sounding one syllable brand name associated with that feature. Speaking of which, a cool name for that product on GoToMeeting would be Goo. And a cool name for that same product on WebEx would be Wee.

GoToMeeting and WebEx, I just saved you millions on consulting fees for finding those new product names for you. You're very welcome !

Except for Gmail Google services are a joke

[future assassin]

I had my business listing show up on the side and at top of search when people searched online for a service like mine in my area. This was for Google business/maps or whatever the hell they call it every 6 months. Had a good Google+ page. Use to get quite a few calls from my shop showing up on the search. Then one day it just disappeared. I got a bit busy with the shop for a few months and was like ok someone did a better job then me and got listed first now BUT not so, somewhere again Google changed their fucking Local Business crap and fully deleted my shop from their social media shit services and maps. When I logged in it stated my listing was removed for some violation which they wont tell you what it is, as they say it might help people to game the system.

When you submit a review it asks you to link to the page on Google maps/Business BUT when they remove it there is no link as its all been deleted by them.

Anyways after going WTF it was easier to just deleted the whole account and start over.

Re:Except for Gmail Google services are a joke

[Mikkeles]

Even GMail sucks. Our sorry story:

Off to Italy, having done our communications and reservations, etc. with a GMail account.

Arrived in Rome and attempted to use it to provide/get further information.

Oh noes! You're using your account from a different location! Nobody ever travels or gets a GMail account to be universally (earthily?) accessible!

You must send us your cell phone number (we don't have one) or your home e-mail address so we can ask for confirmation. We can't access that. In fact, we used a GMail account so as to not bother with setting up a web access.

    Fortunately, I saved the previous e-mails, created a new GMail account and used that to communicate. Most people just reply, so we got the responses on the new account.

Summary: GMail sucks.

Re:The only way to make meetings less annoying

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Also, a big clock that starts a 3-minute count down as soon as it recognizes a new voice would be great.

Or a "mumble meter" that would tell the mopes camping the local meeting in the background to speak the fuck up.

Re:Confused

[nine-times]

Hangouts has been a single unified app that gives consumer-grade IM, voice calls, and video conferencing. They're now splitting the functionality into two products: an audio/video conferencing app, and a text-based chat app. Further, each of those applications are have features added in the hopes of competing with existing business-grade solutions. The audio/video conferencing is getting some features to put it more in line with WebEx, while the text-based chat is being changed to be more like Slack.

That seems to be the basic idea, at least, as far as I can gather.

I've been using Hangouts to add people via phone numbers for years. So now the hangout has the ability to dial into it? So they just added the opposite connection direction?

Yeah, that seems to be the idea. I think they're saying that they've just streamlined the process for inviting people and allowing them to join Hangout meetings, with the aim to make it look more business-y so that businesses that use WebEx and GoToMeeting might use Hangouts instead. I don't use Hangouts enough to know all of what changes they'd need to do to make that happen, but they've been signaling for a while that they want to turn Hangouts into a business-oriented component of the G-Suite, in order to compete better with Office 365.