Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Bright Spot for Google+
wired.com
wired.com
I have 1 Gmail account and 2 Google Apps accounts. I use Gtalk and have G+ configured on the Gmail, and 1 domain has Gtalk enabled and G+ disabled, and the other has both disabled.
This morning I installed Hangouts on my Android as I read the press about how this would replace Gtalk and figured I should get used to the interface.
What is now displayed confuses me greatly.
Is this G+? How come this app is working on the domains on which it is disabled?
Is this Gtalk? How come I cannot see/find my Gtalk contacts and my native Gmail account is showing me what I recognise as circles in the place I would expect to see my Gtalk contacts.
Where are the archived chats from Gtalk? Still archived in my Gmail? If so, why does this app say I have no archived chats? Will future archived items be in my Gmail? Even for the domains in which G+ is disabled (if, as I'm currently assuming they will actually be in G+ because otherwise it would show the archived chats that are in my Gmail)?
The native Gmail seems to allow group chat, but the corporate account doesn't... why?
It asked to confirm my number, but doesn't seem to like the fact that all three accounts are 1 number... why? I am the same person, several accounts and 1 phone.
I simply don't know what Hangouts is as a product and how the various accounts I have will work or what options should be set where to make it predictable.
And just to top off the confusion, my girlfriend has clearly added the app too, as I got a confused email from her and 5 minutes later an email asking me to install Whats App.
I feel I've gone from something I knew and had control of, to something that really confuses. I've told my girlfriend to just send me an email or call me... we can both just understand that.
Is there some epiphany I'm missing?
Edit: This is in the context of someone who is very familiar with the existing/old offerings and used them a fair bit. It's the 'replacing' bit and not being able to see anything familiar or old in the new which makes it confounding.
It's another huge marketing/branding failure by Google too. They expect the world to learn intimate details of all their crazy products that aren't hinted at by naming. Google loves to hijack short and extremely common words to use as opaque identifiers for products.
Examples: "Google Wave" -- meaningless unless you read about it extensively. "Circles" -- takes a while for people to realize it's actually "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time." "Google Hangouts" -- okay, "hangout" kinda works, but it feels way too casual. I don't want to "hangout" with most work people. What is it anyway? Video chat? Text chat? A Skype replacement? Mobile messaging focused? People don't really know unless they research it first.
I think this is perhaps my fault, I failed to explain in my message that the confusion isn't with the notion of Hangouts as a new product, it's very specifically in context of replacing existing services I know and use, and how I cannot cognitively see the old service in the new, to the degree that I'm now very confused about the whole offering (and am not the only one).
You can't name your product "Google Friend List Where People Can Exist In Multiple Lists At The Same Time," just as much as "anti-people-in-ivory-towers-who-think-they-can-unilaterally-do-whatever-they-want" (from your future comment) makes not sense.
They have to go outside that process to hire full stack tech + 360 degree user experience, which they only do if they pre-determined the hire (thereby bypassing the screens, interviews, and committees, which are made up of depth-first experts who naturally rate based on candidate depth within each interviewer's scope).
This selectivity problem (rejection of "Renaissance" women or men) could become increasingly apparent as their products attempt broader and more integrated reach.
On the other hand, perhaps management realizes there is an issue, as evidenced by more and more frequently reaching past their defined hiring process to poach pre-selected hires with broader expertise.
Maybe this bi-modal hiring is the answer, though their current approach misses out identifying and hiring talented prospects who aren't already valley famous yet could help address the very valid concerns buro9 raises here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5727576 > http://blog.idonethis.com/post/50579439215/the-most-innovati...
But a comment from someone "familiar with the current engineering hiring practices at Google" argues the opposite, along the lines of my concerns above:
Good stuff:
- Works well, even with relatively poor network conditions and people located in many continents.
- Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction.
- Doesn't crash (you'd think this would not be notable, but try Skype some time ...)
Bad stuff:
- User interface sucks. I get confused every single time I try to start a new hangout. There seem to be multiple ways to start a hangout, none of them obvious.
- Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private.
- Privacy of the whole thing is suspect (it is Google after all). The G+ plugin is incredibly invasive, to the point where I have a separate computer entirely for G+ / hangouts and I use it for nothing else.
Yep, so you end up making it public, then going back and downloading it, then deleting it from YouTube.
Google seems to have a fixation that everything in the universe must exist on the web -- and be accessed by typing into the Google search box. Whatever we do in life, we get back to it from that little search box.
I'm not sure I understand why they can't even offer 720p recording for the videos, though, even if they can't do 720p streaming right now.
Hope that's useful for comparing; I think the companies themselves can probably be clearer about any differences.
I agree with most of the points you've raised. In low bandwidth settings my personal experience is that skype does better sound-wise though.
Judging by my contact list and the lists of others I see, statuses and presence are a really big deal: people use red-dot to mean "I'm here but interrupt me only if it's crucial" and green-dot to say "fire at will!".
Hangouts supports none of this, only a very simplistic "I'm actively on a device". There's no way to append "... and I'm working, so please don't interrupt unless you have to". You can mute notifications, for a preset amount of time, but that's not the same either -- it's turning off your phone rather than setting it to silent.
I guess they see this as "advanced" functionality, but judging by the people I know it isn't. They may have just copied Facebook, but Facebook messenger isn't something people leave on all day, and it also allows you to selectively block groups of chatty people until you're ready for them.
I never sign into the old Talk on my gmail account because I find it very very distracting. The presumption of Talk (or other IM clients) is that if I am online, then I am willing to be interrupted to answer your message immediately. That's absolutely not the case --- if I'm working, I'll answer your message later.
The Hangouts (SMS-like) model is much more useful to me --- you can always feel free send me a message, but I will answer it when I see fit. Hangouts gives a hint as to whether I'm likely to read your message soon, but there's no promise of a synchronous response.
The SMS model is much less useful to IM users. If I was willing to wait for a reply at the other person's convenience, I wouldn't be IMing them, I'd email or SMS them.
IM is the online equivalent of a voice call: live and direct. That's going away with hangouts, and that's bad. I don't want to start having to make phone calls again /shudder.
I never modulate my IM status manually because I don't like broadcasting that information and I don't like the overhead. I want the ability to ignore people and answer when I'm ready. All my IM clients are set to "always online" (without even automatic modulation) because I want people to expect that even if I am online, I may not be able to answer right away, and that they should expect asynchronous replies when attempting any communication with me that is not naturally synchronous (a natural, real-life conversation or a close emulation thereof (video/voice call)).
Sure, some people treat it is as async, but the way it's been used in my experience is as mostly sync. Treating it as async gets perceived as rude, unless you're very explicit about it (or if people see you're always "available", then they get the message).
(Also note that Hangouts might make things worse for you too, as you'll only be green-dot when you're actually at your computer, so people will know when you're actually there and ignoring them)
And you can always just not respond...
Google+ might be onto something by focusing on "IM/chat" and other means of communication, particularly outside of the united states.
They'll still be faced with the same problem of enticing users to switch to their service. I think Google took the reasonable path.
It mixed my gchat and phone contacts, so now the list of contacts is a giant unusable mess. I can't see who of my friends are online. They moved the send button from being at the bottom-right of the virtual keyboard to above the keyboard next to the input text area which is awkward. I don't use google+ and yet multiple friends were "blocked in google+" and I had to unblock them.
GChat / google talk have been the primary way I've kept in touch with friends and family for years. The android talk app was perfect - intuitive, fast, simple. It provided exactly what I needed - who is online, away, busy, offline and a fast simple way to chat with them.
If this is the future for gchat, I'm going to have to try to convince friends and family to switch back to AIM or MSN Messenger.
I may need two phones to keep this stuff separate properly.
Also if they were going to do this, they should've done it across all Gtalk platforms at once, so nobody feels the "fragmentation" between the services. I heard it will begin being rolled out to Gmail soon, but still. It all should've happened in day one.
While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance:
from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]":
""" TV Set-top design Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”. An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦ error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance. """
[1]http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/... [2]https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS
Given how long ago that was, I'm guessing it still doesn't quite work, it doesn't fit into a feasible footprint, or it interferes with some other more-valued part of the current backlight/display/glass arrangement.
If you're going to rewrite the title, it could just as easily have been "Google attempts to unify its messaging products."
I'm wondering if G+ is taking off with the younger crowd since there's a logical pathway from Gmail which seems to be the mail everyone at that age uses. The same seems to be true for Google chat, which my daughters use a lot.
It'll be interesting how important MOOCs will be to the direction and success of Google's efforts to create a social platform.
The last time I tried out G+ was a few weeks ago, and I can't emphasize just how heinous the UI was - so heinous that I got the impression that it must have been deliberately so.