Google Meet premium video conferencing is now free for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Google Meet premium video conferencing is now free for everyone

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182 pointsthecybernerd110 comments

My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings".

This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition.

I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)

Yeah I'm only getting "Your account only lets you join meetings" as well... seems like there hasn't been a full roll out yet.

Are you both in the US?

It could be another "free for everyone" where everyone means "US only for now". Pretty frustrating when that happens.

The post says “beginning next week”; not only has there not been a full roll-out yet, the phased roll-out hasn't started. The HN headline is misleading and inserts and “is now” that is not in the source (which instead just has an em-dash)

Second paragraph says _with availability rolling out over the coming weeks_ so it looks like it might take a while for some people to get access.

> My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings".

from the blog post:

It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

Key phrase: “beginning next week”.

It's the same for me, so I tried submitting the form to be notified when it is available. Turns out my name is "invalid".

Am I the only one who still uses hangouts? For some reason its the app my wife and I use, i dont use it with anyone else. It's handy that it pops up in chrome, and my Google Fi messages pop up in it too.

I still use it. Partly it's habitual since "GChat" was a big reason I got my first Gmail account many years ago. At the time, most IM platforms required you to install a separate application, but since it ran in the browser, I could keep a Gmail tab open at work or at on university PCs and keep in touch with Gmail contacts (as well as AIM contacts which was still a decent number of people back then).

I still use it because it's available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well as both Android and iOS devices. My friends and family are on a variety of platforms but we can all use Hangouts. I still dislike some of the changes they've made as it moved from the old Google Talk to Hangouts but being able to follow conversations on mobile and in my browser is great.

I have a few friends who use iPhones and occasionally complain because they want to use iMessage, but a good 30-40% of us can't run it since we don't own iPhones or Apple computers.

I have a handful of friends who I chat with daily via Hangouts. Text only, though (though I did once do a video call with one while I was strolling through Disneyland, back when we could still stroll through Disneyland).

It's a great solution, and it'll be a shame if Google ever really gets rid of it.

Daily. I also use Google Voice so it's my SMS app.

Rumours of Hangouts' death are greatly exaggerated. I used it a few weeks ago.

Also, in Google's defence, no-one loved Wave, and they gave it to Apache rather than vanishing it. (Unlike Reader, which just vanished forever.)

I loved Wave, and what they gave away was a super unimpressive install process that you'd have to federate with other people anyway.

That strikes me as a nitpick. They gave away the code for what was previously a fully managed service. A smooth install process wasn't originally a goal. No sense biting the hand that feeds.

If the world had wanted Wave, it would have lived on, rather than Apache eventually retiring it.

I guess you werent there, attempting to install the service that was shut down abruptly with barely/no documentation and no way to use it with anyone else?

Ok, so they could have done a better job transitioning it to an Open Source project. I maintain that Google deserves credit for releasing and Freeing/Open Sourcing the source code.

If the interest were there, the new maintainers could have handled repackaging and documenting.

I loved the idea of Wave. Especially the idea that a company like Google was creating a new technology that wasn't a walled garden.

The only reason they seem to have killed Hangouts was to monetise it as a business tool.

So in essence they have just removed the entire reason for Google's disastrous messaging strategy for the last five years.

How senior heads at Google are not rolling for this I don't know.

Wait, they had something simple to understand (Duo for consumers, Meet for professionals), and now everyone has access to two different products doing about the same thing?!

Google and messaging products... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat

And that page still doesn't list GTalk, the precursor for hangouts.

It does, it's the second top-level bullet point:

> Google Talk, a defunct instant messaging service released by Google in 2005

The page was last edited over a week ago, so it's not like I'm seeing a newer version than what you're seeing, either.

Or did you think "GTalk" was an official brand? Google has never abbreviated it that way, only users.

Except they didn't interoperate, Duo didn't work on laptops, Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding...

> Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding

How did video decoding in software affect sound quality? Is this just a typo/brainfart?

The video encoding/decoding could have leveraged hardware accelerated codecs and freed up resources for audio encoding/decoding

Audio encoding is not of particularly high complexity. Even the highest complexity modes of the best codec right now (Opus) are like 60-100x real time on commodity hardware, and not too far off on phones.

I don't know if it's what they mean but having your fans go absolutely nuts in every meeting can't be great for sound quality.

Having spent 5 mins debugging it... it looks like the audio and video buffers are occasionally not exactly the same lengths, and it causes a glitch in the audio whenever the audio buffer is slightly longer.

It doesn't seem to happen when not CPU capped though, which I haven't quite figured out...

Duo works fine on my $200 Chromebook.

Duo works on any browser at https://duo.google.com

>Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop

Certainly not my experience. I use a few different video platforms including Meet and have never noticed material differences in sound quality. I mostly use an iMac but it's about a 5 year old system so it's hardly high-end by today's standards.

I have a wife and a child who use Meet regularly, both via sub-$400 laptops. No issues that they've reported.

Duo is for 1:1 video calls and has stickers and cute animations.

Meet is a video conferencing tool. What's the confusion?

Duo now supports 12 people on one call.

Hm, duodecuple is the tuple for 12. Maybe this was their plan all along.

That makes sense since we all have exactly 12 friends, that's the official friend cap for the year 2020.

Anything more and it gets super tedious to maintain 6 feet of separation and still be able to hear each other.

Not on the web.

I just want to +1 Google Meet, its one of the rare video chat products that works without any flaws with 150+ people in a room.

During the CV lockdown, there's been a creeping adoption of paid Zoom accounts in the large company I work for, despite ubiquitous free Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite).

This seems to be mainly based on the perception (which I share) that Zoom copes better with large meetings and/or bandwidth challenges, and possibly offering the 'tile view' that Meet previously lacked. (It may also be because of novelty, or novelties such as being able to replace the background, which people love.)

>Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite)

This is one of the main reasons I mostly use Meet. It's basically a couple clicks in Google Calendar to add the video meeting link.

A couple? One for adding (or automatically always), Two when joining, One when you have hardware in physical meeting rooms. It is perfect.

Google Plus Meet? Huh. Did somebody tell Raed667 our plan? We are supposed to be a secret until we kill the normal Google Meet and release our superior chat product Google Plus Meet.

If I read it right, they still require everybody joining to have a Google account. Which means the others that don't require this will keep growing. I mean, we're a Google shop ok, but requiring our customers to use google accounts is just something that we can not do.

I think you are misreading it, and you only need a Google Account to host not to join.

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.

This quote from the linked post would suggest otherwise.

Missed that, good point.

I think what that means is, if you have a GSuite account, you can let anonymous users join your Meet. But if you just have an individual, personal account, you cannot.

So, if you are a G shop already, then it shouldn't prevent your customers from joining your meeting without having a Google account. But if you're trying to host that meeting via a personal Gmail account, you will run into a problem if a non-Google account tries to join.

We don't see that and use Meet (via GSuite) to have external calls with people and have never heard that that require a Google account.

Because the paid G Suite behaves different than the free Meet they announce now. Makes sense, because external dial (via phone) costs them money.

Funnily enough, gsuite let’s you share a document to a non google email address. You’d think meet would add that functionality.

Suddenly every big tech company wants a piece of the zoom pie.

I quite like Google hangouts (now meet?), it's simple to use and comes packaged free with g-suite.

I run a small business so for just myself it's less than $100.

Amazing value.

The crazy thing is google had like 10 years where the zoom pie could have been theirs for the taking. But they always just let hangouts sit there without trying much of anything in the way of improving it. I swear for a good 3-5 years in the early to mid 2010’s, almost every time I’d try to join a hangout meeting in chrome the audio wouldn’t work and I’d have to restart the browser and try again.

And now they’re actually trying? We’re they genuinely surprised to learn there’s a market for corporate video chat?

They have so much cash they could use to build stuff and push in enterprise but don't. I feel as though they're a little directionless with their strategies.

Best product they've created after Gmail has definitely been G suite though.

We use Meet already for 3-4 years including hardware in the meeting rooms. It is awesome. Zoom got virally popular and had the big grid view which made it popular in these times. However, practically spoken, Meet was always there and was already productive for many years.

Hangout != Meet

This is great, we've been using Meet a lot since WFH started and it's been pretty solid and decent enough quality.

My only gripe and unless I'm missing it, it's not possible to log into Meet on Android without also logging into the Google account on the device too. This is frustrating because sometimes I want to jump on a work call but all I've got is my personal device handy. I really wish they'd separate out Meet App users from Device users like the iOS version of the app :(

And also if you do something bad with your account the whole company can get locked out of their email, since now they are connected. Sending illegal photos to personal accounts of company members looks like a solid DOS attack vector. Google customer support only aggregates the problem.

Can't you do it in a browser? Then just use an incognito window - that's what I do for work emails when out and about.

This doesn't address your comment about device users per se, but you can have multiple accounts on your device and meet will let you choose which one to use when joining calls.

I'd have probably have had to do this but luckily I have an old phone that I can use for my work account. I just really don't like linking work and personal accounts at a device level given the multiple ways that might cause problems.

Thinking on it a little more, I guess that since this product has been generally aimed at businesses, maybe this isn't normally a problem for people with company devices.

Android has this concept of Work Profiles, where your work account apps are isolated from your personal apps. It works well with Meet and you have a single button to immediately disable all the Work apps (including their notifications).

It gives you way better separation than anything on iOS.

HN headline inserts “is now” incorrectly, the source headline does not say that and the text indicates a phased rollout starting next week.

This is of course a good development for those cases where Jitsi is unstable. Although:

>Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30.

So actually it won't be different from Zoom because there's going to be an - albeit longer - time limit. Not enforcing this during the upcoming months of quarantine is a nice move.

We are being spammed by Google Account Managers to join in on the Google Meet, even though it's not available for our basic tier. After we have specifically declined the invitation multiple times, we are now being spammed to join in for free until September 30th. I do not want to break the Account Manger's heart, but we simply cannot rely on any product Google makes[0]. We still use docs/sheets and email, but that's about it - hopefully they won't manage to kill/mess that up as well.

[0] - https://killedbygoogle.com/

You don't have to rely on Meet being around forever though. Video chats are ephemeral and if Meet goes away for some reason, you can switch to something else without too much pain.

It’s not so painful these days but when we actually use conference rooms it’s a bit more painful to make all the microphones and cameras and displays and controllers talk to a new platform

You’re being spammed because their KPI shows that spamming their own Google Accounts increase the revenue from your account. Except they haven’t realised that the reason that revenue is increased is because the customers have to pay more for the email storage due to them spamming you.

Google don't generally seem to kill their enterprise cloud products, more the consumer ones

Are you talking about the basic tier of GSuite? That actually does include Meet.

And Zoom stock is down 7% right now. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+ZM

They've also added Meet to G Suite mail menus. Is there a way to get rid of those links?

Block the element using uBlock Origin?

I hope Google eats Zoom alive by just throwing resources and whatever cloud service power at this. Video chat should only always have been browser based website/web app and never involved installers and stuff.

It can't do PC audio when presenting so a video or other content won't make it through without cleverly routing your PC audio through your mic. I have a GSuite account for my domain as it has a lot of useful tools for cheap (1 user). I was using it for hang out type sessions with friends and family but we moved to other tools to play party games or similar with others.

I guess where I'm going is if they allowed audio when presenting I'd use it for everything again.

- Google Hangouts

- Google Hangouts Meet

- Google Hangouts Chat

- Hangouts Chat

- Google Chat

- Google Talk

- Google Allo

- Google Due

- Google Voice

- Google Meet

- Android Messages

- Youtube Messages

Product management at its best. Half of the time I don't know which app I am using.

Duo as well?

thanks, added that one as well.

With a typo.

I love that in Google Hangouts chat, default chat app on Android phone, there is no search capability.

I keep using it because I'm assuming they will add it eventually. I still find the Gmail+chat+hangout combo to be extremely robust and easy -- I just don't know why it isn't supported.

You didn't miss that it's about to get killed right? I've been an avid user of Google Hangouts. I wonder what will I use instead.

Wait, the chats are getting killed? Or the video? Or is it getting renamed?

Super confused.

I found out about it on https://killedbygoogle.com/ just now. However, after double-checking, apparently it's some G Suite Hangouts variant that's getting killed: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-hang...

You can export your Hangouts chat history on takeout.google.com. The resulting Hangsouts.json file is human-readable but not fun to read. I have a one-liner to convert it into something nicer, but it doesn't resolve user names and you need to figure out the conversation ID you want to export yourself.

    jq -c '.conversations[] | select(.conversation.conversation_id.id == "YOUNEEDTOFILLTHISINYOURSELF") | .events[] | [(.timestamp | tonumber / 1000000 + (9*3600)| strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S (%a)")), .sender_id.gaia_id, [.chat_message.message_content.segment[]?.text], .chat_message.message_content.attachment[]?.embed_item?.plus_photo?.url?]' Hangouts.json | sort > foo.log

When you open Hangouts.json, you'll see that every conversation has something like this at the beginning:

    "conversation_id": { "id": "BASE64-LIKE_STRING" }

This BASE64-LIKE_STRING belongs into the YOUNEEDTOFILLTHISINYOURSELF placeholder.

Hangouts conversations are archived in your gmail, you could search there.

The new version of Chat has a search functionality so you'll likely get it when the transition's done.

If they change the name fast enough maybe they escape from having to cancel it?

Make sure the one you choose doesn’t get discontinued tho

I think Meet == Hangouts Meet, now? And maybe Google Hangouts Chat == Hangouts Chat == Google Chat?

But yes, your underlying point about the total ridiculousness of this is good.

They've clearly learnt from Microsoft.

Is Hangouts even a thing? I still see people pop-up in the Hangout chat section of gmail, I occasionally message people but never get replies. So it's either broken or I'm being ignored :)

It's still a thing for people that started using it when it was the latest Google chat product. It may be surprising but people just want stable chat experience not chasing whatever next product Google releases or kills next year.

(I did migrate my family and friends to self hosted XMPP server as Hangouts doesn't have E2EE)

The is a chat-like client builtin to Photos now. It is actually pretty nice to easily send pictures to my mother with the ability to answer questions about them. Unlike other chats no need to download and reupload the pictures.

When that came out I was rather surprised it wasn't just an extension to Hangouts or one of their other chat apps.

Hangouts was great when it came out and a bunch of people I know adopted it... and then it stopped getting meaningful updates - instead of growing and expanding hangouts, they decided to rename it, replace it, redo it. I'm pretty sure there's a team at google that's just renames products.

Well, to be fair:

  - Google Chat = Hangouts Chat = Google Hangouts Chat
  - Google Hangouts Meet = Google Meet
  - Google Hangouts = Google Talk = soon to be dead
  - Google Allo = dead
  - Youtube Messages = is it even a separate product?

So by the end of 2020, the line-up should be like:

  - Google Meet (=Zoom)
  - Google Chat (=Slack)
  - Google Duo (=FaceTime)
  - Google Voice (=Phone call)
  - Android Messages (=SMS).

Not ideal, but not as bad as you described.

Did anyone notice the picture of the doctors office (in the press release) has a picture on the wall that is blurred out?

No, but I did notice that the doctor has a stethoscope around her neck, which seems strange for an online meeting.

"Okay, now hold your laptop's microphone to your chest. I'm going to use this stethoscope on my speaker; it'll be just like you're here."

Why aren't we all using free video chat clients that run over webrtc?

If you want a serious answer is because peer to peer webRTC doesn't scale beyond two people.

If you have 4 people every client would need to maintain 3 streams, a total of 6 streams between all participants.

To have any kind of scalability you need a proxy in the middle that can act as a single stream to each participant.

This middlebox can also handle normalisation, interpolation and other useful features you might want to smooth things out when clients have connection difficulties.

Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation? Because these days just publishing a protocol isn't enough for adoption; not to mention that proxying large amounts of data will incur a significant cost.

And that hasn't covered the need for authentication, which is yet another required service.

And if the proxy box is interpolating and gracefully handling frame drops, does that mean it will be handling gasp decrypted video traffic? Yes, it will, unless you want to move all that to the client and then have a key exchange happen not just at the start but a renegotiation every time someone connects or disconnects.

So you see it's not as simple as, "everyone just opens this URL, webRTC is a thing duh".

Valid points, but challenges of this kind have never stopped open source developers before.

By the way, one of the clients could serve as the middlebox, I suppose, to be determined by a consensus algorithm.

In theory one could implement the "supernode" model using WebRTC, turning the client with the best connection into a middlebox as well. In practice I suppose many meetings don't have any clients with a connection that could support that kind of bandwidth requirements.

> Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation?

Isn't that what Jitsi is doing? https://github.com/jitsi, meet.jit.si

Must use chrome extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v...

Grid view is the default view now in meet. It rolled out (for my org at least) yesterday.

Oh, that's good to know.

and just like that, zoom now faces its doom....

Zoom grew a lot with the long tail. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.

Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.

But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.

In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.

The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.

Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?

Web browsers alrrady have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.

There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.

That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.

These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.

So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.

Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”

We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app

Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:

  Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)

It’s as simple as that. And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot password, account management you just do:

  Q.Users.login(options)

If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use

  Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()

Reusable tools are placed like this:

  Q.activate(
    Q.Tool.setUpElement(
      element,
      “Streams/chat”,
      options
    );
  );

or with jQuery:

  $(element).tool(name)
  .activate(options)

You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. Our goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tesed reusable components that anyone can use, even if they are not very technical.

Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It’s totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done.

If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com

Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.

Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconferencd in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.

Oh look! They made another communication tool!

So we have now:

- Google Hangouts

- Google Meet

- Google Duo

Am I missing any other? Is there any difference between them?

Hangouts has video and chat and is being discontinued.

- Google Meet: Zoom

- Google Duo: Facetime

- Google Chat: Slack

want to use google chat to replace the hangouts that I have with a certain group [because the hangouts interface and mobile notifications aren't great].. it's available for my G Suite accounts, but not my generic @gmail account. which is kind of maddening.

Google have got to learn that they have not rolled out a successful consumer product in quite some time whereas Apple do, and a big part of it is this stupid, stupid "rolling out in the next few weeks" attitude they love so much.

Product launches need a big red go button in 2020 or they don't work, especially when you're already three months behind the curve.

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