I'm confused- as far as I'm aware, there are three different video calling products at Google - Hangouts, Meet, and now Duo? What are the similarities/differences between them?
Meet == Zoom. It's video conferences for businesses.
Duo == FaceTime. It's video calling, with integrations into the Phone app on Android.
There is a timeline, at least for entreprise customers.
> Classic Hangouts will be retired for all G Suite customers starting in October 2019
Chat within Gmail is still hangouts. Hangouts.google.com still works. Users still use the hangouts apps.
On the personal side, if you use Google Fi, SMS integration is still only available via Hangouts. This is a somewhat unique feature of Fi and Google Voice. You can send/receive SMS within Hangouts via browser or app all the same. It's not like the Messages app for web (which relies on your phone being online).
They have a newer timeline at https://support.google.com/a/answer/9197126?hl=en&ref_topic=...
IIRC, hangouts chat is still only available to paid g-suite customers.
Then they decided that wasn't the way they wanted things and have been slowly killing it off for 5ish years now
I think it's still using some proprietary transport which is UDP over TCP over UDP or something...
TBF both Meet and Duo have been awesome, Hangouts has withered on the vine. It could have been a unified solution but... Google.
My understanding is Google has said externally that they plan on killing the classic Hangouts product. So that means Google chat and Google Meet would be available in consumer space for people with @gmail.com addresses. but right now the focus of those two products is on gSuite.
I'd also definitely agree with what other people are saying, duo is the FaceTime competitor. It has direct integration into the Google dialer in the Google SMS app. It's also rather brain dead simple to use.
Specifically, where do the private keys reside?
This is weird to hear, to me hangouts was always the new thing that ousted gchat.
> google chat [...] would be available in consumer space
I can't imagine they're bringing back the old old thing, are they?
The Wikipedia disambiguation page really clears up the mess that is Google's branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat
> Google Talk, also known as Google Chat,[1] was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication.[2] The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.[3]
What a mess.
Are they too scared of regulators to make an iMessage-like service in Android? RCS will barely nibble at the ground they need to cover in order to compete for real.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21215588/google-chat-hango...
It is effectively a slack or teams competitor.
Classic Hangouts is/was a lot of things. Sadly it was too many things. The new Chat has very similar Gmail integration, so if they ever get it out to consumer, it hopefully won't be a big change for people.
Desktop -- Meet/Chat converging and getting a unified UI for business/desktop users.
I think it is taking time, but it's finally happening and Hangouts will officially be shut down when the merging happens.
The integration with Meet consists of a single "invite to video call" button that creates a new video call and inserts the link into your message. There's no option to stop people from inviting you to new calls/set your Google chat status as busy when accepting a call.
Meet itself is also frustrating to use for anything more than a 2-3 person meeting; it doesn't display more than 4 video feeds at once on your screen. It's also unable to save settings between video calls (if you don't want to have incoming and outgoing 720p streams all the time you have to change the settings at the start of every call). Zoom and even Jitsi are both miles ahead of it.
There is no reason to use either product besides the fact that they come with enterprise Gmail accounts. They both still feel like prototypes or minimum viable products (especially Chat).
A mobile only consumer proposition is useless. Sounds like Google's internal strategy here is still a disaster.
The "knock" feature is kinda novel and weird (in a good way). When you call someone, they can see your video feed before they answer the call.
I agree though, this feature seems like a solution in search of a problem. If I'm answering the call it seems more natural to activate both cameras at the same time, and for calls I'm not going to answer the video feed just seems unnecessarily distracting. I'm sure that I have never wished for a feature like this.
Seems like the sort of thing that perverts would take advantage of.
Presumably you would know who you're video calling anyhow prior to calling them, so there's not really a meaningful privacy violation...
The only case I can think of is you calling me to expose yourself or something - to that, I'd say that a privacy option where you can make it so you have to add someone before they can video call you would suffice.
One of the problems with an opt-out setting is that it can become a viable attack vector whenever the application settings reset: "OMG New phone for my 14th birthday" will look like an invitation to some segment of the population.
http://support.google.com/duo/answer/6376115
Google knows about dick pics.
And limiting it to contacts doesn't solve the problem.
Why should my phone be displaying something chosen by someone else unless I explicitly opted to engage with them (in this case by answering a video call)?
Plus, even if I did have contacts with a dick pic sense of humor, I'd much rather see a dick from them after I opt in to the call (so that I make sure I'm in an appropriate setting). Getting one randomly is insane.
Imagine if your husband or wife called you for some phone sex (say you are on a long trip) but you happen to be in the elevator with strangers on the way to your room. Brrring! No thanks.
Whereas solutions like Meet and Zoom are designed primarily (both UX and architecture) around multi-party, supporting 100's (250 for Meet, 500 for Zoom).
But under the hood, limiting the number of users allows some important technical advantages. Duo claims (in its FAQ) to be end-to-end encrypted. I believe Whatapp claims the same. And it wouldn't surprise me, knowing Apple, if their video chats on Facetime did too. This is possible only with a reasonable limit on the number of participants because of the need to negotiate a bandwidth for each stream that works for all viewers, and each stream needs to be independent, not multiplexed into a single live view.
The proper use of large-scale meeting products is in corporate or paid environments where you have some kind of guarantee that your chats aren't being recorded or sold. (At least unless a three letter agency is involved.) Tools that guarantee end-to-end encryption should be used in small group chats.
Your point about UX is a strong one too. There are a affordances that work better for smaller chats, others for larger ones, and it's helpful to be able to specialize.
Because beyond UX, there are a ton of technical tradeoffs involved.
In a 2-person call you want to avoid a server if possible, because it adds latency -- so that's a good first reason. Zoom and Meet would never dream of not using a server.
The optimal architecture of a "small group call" is totally different from a "large group call".
In banking/financial services, we want guarantees that all chats are being recorded. In lots of other regulated and government fields too.
Although to be fair, me confusing Duo Security and Duolingo is because I use both and both have nearly the same green for logos.
This is very worrying because hangouts is the only thing I use. All of my contacts use hangouts except for a few SMS, and I heard about Slack.
And this is a mostly current or ex Google crew...
I’m definitely not holding my breath though.