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Comment by rzendacott | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.

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So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now. Just one use case for online statuses. Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.

It depends on your use case.

Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.

So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.

That's a really good point. I just use hangouts for personal communication, but as a company chat system it does seem pretty necessary to know someone's status. Hopefully it'll be added soon!

Using gtalk for SMS was so much more convenient, because you could just press the contact icon, and get gtalk as an option.

They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.

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