Google is rebranding Hangouts Chat as just Google Chat | Hacker News Reader

Google is rebranding Hangouts Chat as just Google Chat

theverge.com

15 pointssdhillon9 comments

Didn't their used to a be a Google Chat? Isn't that what the chat in Gmail was/is? What about Google Ello or whatever it was called. I'm so confused. I can say for certain I won't be bothering using it. Signal/Matrix/WhatsApp and JitsiMeet and whatever the people I work with need to use are more than good enough.

Yes, the chat in Gmail was "Gmail Chat" aka Gchat, released back in 2006. The standalone app was called Google Talk. [1]

And in 2017, they forced everyone off Google Talk / Gchat and onto Hangouts [2], only to bring us back to where we are.

I'd love to hear the behind-the-scenes about this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15051272/google-talk-gcha...

No, not really bringing us back where we were. Back then in the beginning it was a federated XMPP implementation and you could talk with G Chat accounts from outside the Google ecosystem and that's not changing.

Also, there's another "Chat" in Google stables right now - Google's RCS messaging app.

My guess would be Google is just doing its periodic itch thingie that it does with messengers and social networks.

You're correct.

I too, believe that they replaced a perfectly good product with an inferior one, then had the audacity to assume the name of the original product.

Thanks for clearing up that complete mess.

Just had this conversation with a friend. We can no longer remember what the current name is of Google's messaging products. For a company that prides itself with it's brand and product management, it's ridiculous.

Wasn't it called Google Chat / GChat back in ~2007?

I hope that they will start to put these different chat platforms together. You have Teams, Duo, Hangouts, Allo... (all of which are current, and not listing the other many video chat apps they've already dumped, as mentioned in another thread). They all do relatively the same core thing, but are seemingly incompatible with each other for no reason whatsoever.

I'm guessing this is symptomatic of trying to compete with specific companies' offerings without having a vision of their own, so they end up with a huge amount of overlap, and a huger amount of good services that they end up trashing.

I purposely don't use the Google services that one can predict will eventually get treated like Google's many Blogger attempts. They don't ever become stable enough, and eventually just evaporate when they come up with a tenth iteration.

Oh, Google. Another flavor of the day, or is it the hour? Takeaway: Any Google product has a very very short lifespan, so don't get too attached...

> Takeaway: Any Google product has a very very short lifespan, so don't get too attached...

While that's true, it's not the takeaway from this article. In fact, Google has surprisingly not killed Hangouts yet. This finally seems like a move in the right direction:

- consistent naming, i.e. "Google [One-word Product Function]"

- "Meet" and "Chat" are business/group tools

- "Hangouts" is a personal/social tool

This is the kind of clarity they could've used years ago, instead of creating Allo and Duo.

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