Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs
varun.ch
varun.ch
If you search around the internet, you can find some full screenshots of it as people discovered the features.
https://www.techjunkie.com/google-hangouts-easter-eggs/
Many of the commands that exist, are effectively just text replacement where you swap out some / command for a string that is an emoji like thing, such as: /tableflip
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
The above was actually added to hangouts by a coworker long ago when there weren't as many Easter egg commands (and we worked in payments at that time). The fun of having a fully open codebase, where you can edit and propose changes to anyone's code, you just have to convince them to approve it.
Though I will add, some of the commands actually had animated pictures with them, such as /shydino and /corgis.
My favourite bug (on Android) is when you paste a URL, hit enter to send, then start typing your message related to the URL. Because it wants to process the URL, look it up for a preview, it doesn't send straight away. However when it does, it also includes your absolutely not submitted and presently in draft stage beginnings of your next message.
Unreal.
Shoulda just stuck with Skype or something else.
They removed a button from hangouts a while back that let you send your location to the channel. I guess it wasn't used much, but it was useful to me. Made me miss protocols and RFCs.
The closed captioning in Chat is pretty amazing, though.
You'd think they designed it like that because it works well for their paid use case, using it for work. But no, it's really annoying to use in that context to. I can't call a colleague, instead I have to add an impromptu meeting to the chat, join it myself, wait until they show up. I mean, it's just two of three clicks instead of one, but still.
Once no one will run their SMTP gmail will be similarly killed using the Microsoft's EEE aproach.
They do this over and over again (even the Hangouts essentially killed XMPP). Fuck the cancer that is google. They are actually destroying what Internet was meant to be.
I think you can search hangout messages from GMail tho :)
I remember thinking how genius and novel the approach was, and all the people in my family, even the old, non English speaking, non computer literate people immediately knew how to use it. All you had to do was point people to the app, and they needed no more hand holding.
Of course, it was also a great cross platform user experience, and came about at the exact time mobile phones were blowing up, but I think the differentiating factor was the extreme ease of sign in, in combo with that same mechanism cutting spam made it an obvious choice. Just logging into software with username and password was a big UI hurdle back then for the older people in my family, and probably still is.
I specifically remember one use case that WhatsApp fixed and that google/apple/Microsoft had no answer for. Sharing contacts. It was so hard to share contacts with non tech literate people, and I do not know why all the other messengers by the big companies could not do it, but WhatsApp made it dead easy to send and receive properly formatted contact information.
Everyone around me loved it, though, so the joke was, once again, on me. How come almost nothing I like is popular. And vice versa
To be fair though, while Whatsapp is the default messenger for pretty much everyone, both signal and telegram also have their users, especially with younger people. Eg the volunteers for helping the Ukrainian refugees in my city organize via telegram, and the above-mentioned bikeshop ended up messaging me via Signal.
At the time Whatsapp came out, I was in NYC, and I do not recall anyone not using WhatsApp. I remember how amazing it was to effortlessly chat with my UK family since we were no longer subject to super expensive international SMS/MMS charges.
Best use case is at a wedding or event or on vacation when you want to share pictures/video with others. Simplest mechanism is to send it to them via iMessage.
I think they're making Gmail their collaboration/communication software. You have email, chat, and meet all in there.
I agree, I don't totally understand why they're doing it. That's my best guess.
Zoom in on the lat-lon (0.0,0.0) for a more recent Easter egg :)
https://pastebin.com/raw/2CG1Cdn6
(HN filters most of the emoji making it pointless to paste here)
The widget has changed over the years, getting less and less handy and intuitive, for no apparent reason.
I would say that I’m an advanced user, to say the least, and I still have no idea what is the difference between Gtalk, Hangouts, Meet, and Chat (which is apparently the newest?).
What a mess.
It was posted on HN and generated 80 comments [2].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
I've been very happy with Meet, aside from some browser quirks (blur is not available outside Chrome). It's very easy to create a new meeting and it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar.
GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.
And yet they still run the XMPP servers, though not in a way that's usable as chat. They used the same XMPP servers as GTalk for Cloud Print, for some reason. And now if they turn those servers off, a whole lot of printers with faulty back off logic will start trying to DDoS the data centers.
Cheapest thing to do is apparently to just keep running the servers.
Chat and Meet are decent, and most importantly, they're the only messaging products now.