Hangouts now available in Gmail, Google+ account not required | Hacker News Reader

Hangouts now available in Gmail, Google+ account not required

googleenterprise.blogspot.com

80 pointspatrickaljord24 comments

Google Hangouts is a surprisingly, truly amazing product, marred by its relationship with Google+.

How would it work in your ideal world?

Even if you don't want to use Google+, why can't you think of it as just another account you have to make. Imagine Hangouts was a great stand-alone product made by a start-up. You'd still need a whole different account to use that stand-alone Hangouts product.

So I'd suggest just looking at it like that, if you really don't want anything to do with the whole Google+ part of Hangouts. Plus, it looks like Google wants to make Hangouts work in more of their services than just Google+, and I think that's a great idea. They could probably implement Hangouts in a lot of their other products, to get people to "video socialize" around them, and maybe build fun ways to use it with those other products.

Can't answer for the OP, but for me it would be super-convenient if I could launch a hangout from Google Talk.

I agree, but I think it's ever so slightly ahead of its time, being a bit sluggish on most calls. It'll catch up if they polish what they have in place of expanding feature-set at some point though.

And agreed about the G+ relationship - happy to see it moving into gmail.

...not quite. The hangout backend will now power all video calls, but to do more than a 1-on-1 chat, you will still need a G+ profile.

Interesting as the old backend was p2p, but it sounds like hangouts are a more standard client/server. Maybe Google needed more voice data to mine. Actually better yet, facial expression data to mine. After all, Glass could live and die by its ability to correctly identify faces.

P2P for more than 1-on-1 is a bandwidth concern.

http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

In a P2P video chat setup, each client has to send its video to every other client; if there are 5 clients, and the minimum outbound is 230kb/s, the client has to be able to push 1150kb/s (9.2mbit!) upstream, which is present almost nowhere in residential broadband.

Based on the downstream requirements, it looks like Google is also doing some kind of stream multiplexing before sending the hangout to clients, which reduces the downstream requirements, as well. In a P2P situation, you wouldn't get that benefit.

Even if you go with an "elected master" setup, where the biggest-bandwidth participant is responsible for stream multiplexing and broadcast, then you're disproportionally punishing that user and potentially degrading their user experience by burning a ton of CPU on the multiplexing, and the other clients are subject to their latency to the master node.

Running this through their infrastructure makes a ton of sense without the tinfoil hats.

Why would Google want to mine private video streams when they already have a whole library of static content in the form of YouTube? Besides just the privacy concerns, it would be easier to work with content that's sitting on a disk somewhere, rather than trying to operate on data in-flight.

Glass needs to operate on data in-flight, what better way to train it? However, you do have a point wrt to Youtube. I think I left my <cynicism> tag out of the previous post.

I don't know why you are getting down-voted. It is in Google's interest to have a large training corpus of faces for many machine learning algorithms (face recognition, expression recognition, age detection, etc.).

Training data doesn't need to be in-flight. Testing/operational data does. These are two different things, and the GP makes a good point.

You only need a G+ account to invite more than one person to the video chats, invited people don't need a G+ account.

I don't know about the old Google Talk videochat, but Hangouts have been from a central server from day one.

> Google+ account not required

I think this is misleading on Google's part...

From outward appearances, everyone that has a Google account (aka. GMail) has a G+ account, and the only thing that changes when you "sign up" (or otherwise activate) is that you can log in to it yourself.

I was on G+ for awhile, but I've now since disabled it in my control panel, and yet people still share crap with me (as I'm still in their "circles") -- it just goes to my email. I think the service is always-on, they just don't let you into the UI if it's not "active".

"everyone that has a Google account (aka. GMail) has a G+ account"

Only recent signups are required to have a Google+ account. For older Google/Gmail accounts, you don't need to have Google+.

"yet people still share crap with me (as I'm still in their 'circles') -- it just goes to my email."

I'm on Google+ but I don't get notifications on my email because I turned it off myself.

I can share things with non-Gmail people too on G+. There is an option to share by email with people not using G+ yet. So it's not always-on, they just allow sharing via email.

It's important to note that those 'share by email' things are something the sharer specifically checked - it's not checked by default. If the shares are unwanted, I would complain to the person sharing them (although one imagines the email must include an opt-out link.)

Disappointing that this doesn't include screen sharing. Our team have been using Google Hangouts for remote code reviews as it seems to be one of the better free options for screen sharing at a 30" monitor resolution (MeetingBurner is probably slightly better though). I'd much rather just use our Google apps gmail interface, rather than having to create a second Google+ account.

I use join.me for conducting remote code interviews; there's no Linux client (unfortunately), but for Windows/OS X, it's very nice and extremely readable.

Check out screenleap. I've been using it for a week now and love it.

The truly radical change in Hangout is of course the recent addition of an alert sound being played when Hangout warns you they're about to kill your chat for no particular reason.

Long lived hangouts rarely get to stay on screen, so the silent "are you still there" message shortly followed by a disconnect was painful.

I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video calls open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn much.

> I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video calls open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn much.

Maybe because it's not p2p?

Perhaps this is evidence of Google realizing that they're putting too many good products inside of a product that nobody wants to use? Perhaps Google has regained its sanity?

Haha, just kidding. They're just going to use this to try and get more people on Google+

Would greatly improve the service...

I hope this is the first in a long line of reducing redundancy across Google's messaging platforms. Google+ posts, Google Talk, Google Hangouts, Google+ Messenger, Google Voice. Ahh! I wonder if iMessage's simplicity is motivating it?

I love the power of Google Voice but it doesn't get much love and iMessage is damn simple and pretty.

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