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rwmj

We use Hangouts extensively for meetings. They've almost replaced conference calls.

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.

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> - Sound is excellent, good automatic echo cancellation and reasonable noise reduction.

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.

> - Can't record a hangout and keep the recording private.

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.

While they could just get valuable information from private communication without making it public.

For what it's worth, we've been using UberConference ( http://www.uberconference.com ) to do conference calls and it's been quite good. No video, though.

Is that better than freeconferencecall.com?

I have not tried freeconferencecall.com, so I'm not sure :) However, uberconference does things like text/email people their dial-in info automatically. If you invite someone, it will also let them dial-in without a PIN most of the time, I believe. It can also actually call the invitees if you want it to, rather than waiting for them to call in. It's also unclear if freeconferencecall.com allows you to dial in using a computer—uberconference lets you dial in using Chrome (only Chrome, because it uses WebRTC). Uberconference also has some pretty fine design, but it does not have screen sharing at the moment.

Hope that's useful for comparing; I think the companies themselves can probably be clearer about any differences.

Thanks, will try it.

I imagine recording and saving privately could / will easily become a premium feature.

How well can you read text on some one's screen with Hangouts? I'm trying to find the optimized setup.

I've found that if both users have their windows at full-size, it's fairly easy to read (at least, default Sublime Text 2 is readable) so long as the connection is good. As soon as either user adjusts, it shrinks too much unless you've got the text bumped up quite a bit (and even then, you might be dealing with too much connection fuzz for it to be readable).

I just can't wait until they begin supporting the VP9 codec in it. I presume this is the main reason why they haven't launched 10-way Hangouts with 720p resolution yet. VP9 should help with that.

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.

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