Google talk circa 2008 was a lot nicer than Hangouts is now, too.
The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.
The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.
Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.
I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming.
Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.
I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.
What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.
But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser.
8.5/10, would use again.
It was on the front page of Hacker News just a couple of days ago, and that's where I found out about it. Much nicer clients, open protocol (so you can even make your own clients), reliable, and many more features than Hangouts make this a much better alternative.
For voice and video, however, I haven't found a good alternative that is easily accessible to people that don't want to set things up on their computer. Hangouts will just randomly not work for me, depending entirely on random chance, and I still can't find anything more convenient than it.
I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.
eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.