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The thing that still infuriates me about the new hangouts experience is that they still don't understand the difference between status and presence.

If I don't have some way of knowing whether someone is actively at their keyboard, or has their phone/tablet screen on, and is likely to see my message and respond instantly, then my only recourse is to stare blankly at my display and hope that they show up. This is a huge fucking waste of time. Right now the "green chat bubble" means that the person (is at their computer || owns a smartphone).

Blindingly useless.

> The thing that still infuriates me about the new hangouts experience is that they still don't understand the difference between status and presence.

The critical thing to consider with hangouts is this: it is not Talk/your regular "synchronous" IM system. It is an async system, an extension of SMS (in terms of use case). As such "staring into the screen" is not using the system correctly, since it's a fire-and-forget system that will push-ping you back when the other side replies. Once I acknowledged that, I basically signed out of Hangouts-via-Talk on my computers and happily use it almost solely on mobile, with conversations synced across all devices (the conversation holes themselves in a XMPP client provide for quite an uncanny experience, which is also why I like the SMS/Hangouts split conversations instead of transparent fallback that becomes obvious once you swap devices).

Since it's a significantly different product, I don't know if they had better completely split Hangouts or outright kill Talk, because as such they used network effects to convert people from Talk+Messages Plus+Android Messenger (or whatever it was called) into the unified Hangouts. What I wish though is that they provided extensions to XMPP allowing existing XMPP clients to implement reasonable feature parity for text chats (I could care less for video+audio in my XMPP client of choice, especially given the increase in dependencies and code complexity), so that the experience would be more seamless and more async overall instead of the XMPP-is-sync/hangouts-is-async beast we have to handle, without having a browser plugin overflow into my native OS.

> don't understand the difference between status and presence

That just taught me to use Hangouts for conversations where I don't need (but might welcome) a realtime reply. Hangouts are in a nebulous zone between chat and email for me.

For me, if I absolutely need an instant reply, I really need to call the person. (Even presence indicators aren't a promise that someone will prioritize your IM and reply. There's no indicator for "desperately wants to surrender absolute attention to you no matter how insignificant your topic.")

With Hangouts, they stay "open" in the background, so I can have an idle conversation with new notes every few days, it doesn't bother me. I can have a hangout with multiple people when some are online and others can catch up with the conversation later. And it's less formal / less work than email.

This all comes down to use case. I'd probably grant that Hangouts is a terrible new ICQ. But I've found it to be a great improvement over email for close friends.

to be fair hangouts does show you if the user is typing from mobile or not. but this feature is limited without knowing about presence.

presence is one feature that i liked a lot in google talk and i am baffled this was removed in hangouts. anyone know why?

The only reason I can fathom for something like this is that someone genuinely thought that by taking away features and making the experience "more like texting," they could somehow magically convert texters into hangout-ers.

And that perhaps by lying to users and telling them that all their friends are "online" even when they clearly aren't, people will be more likely to chat with them and "grow" the service. Nevermind that you need another person to actually be there before you can have a conversation.

There must have been at least a fraction of the hangouts development team that thought this was a boneheaded idea. And the millions of complaints that they got when they released? Those didn't stop because the experience got better, they stopped because it was clear that nothing was going to change. This screams "management decision" to me.

I think Google likes to assume everyone is on mobile at all times, and they wanted to make it more like a "texting" experience where you just fire off the message and the other party will just respond when and if they want to.

If you replace 'have poor internet service' by 'use a cellular connection' in your post, it also describes the mobile experience, especially when on the move. The app takes ages to reconnect when its connection is dropped (at least on iOS), and frequently even decides to just sign itself out.

I guess that explains why we can't see if people are online anymore. The app itself doesn't know.

Some (seemingly simple) issues that haven't been fixed:

(a) In the web version, there seems to be no way to curate your "friend list." Despite choosing "Never show," people I've once interacted with via a Craigslist ad keep showing up. Deleting contacts is a pain.

(b) iPhone client lets you enable images in messages. Great! Unfortunately, they don't show up on the web client.

(c) On the iPhone client, past conversations keep popping up even after I "archive" them. They disappear for a bit, and then appear again a few days later.

(d) The GV app doesn't let you make calls inside the app (it insists on calling another number of yours). The GV webpage doesn't either. And yet, the Gmail interface lets you place calls and I use this all the time. So confusing.

Contacts management within G+ / Gmail is beyond stupendously annoying. In a mass of fail, it's fail failing fail failure.

I'm staggered by how much they've ruined phone calls in Gmail, to the point that I can only assume it was deliberate (free US calls costing them too much money). It used to be like a GChat window in the bottom right of Gmail, and load up instantly.

Now it opens a fresh Hangouts window and takes at least 15 seconds to actually answer/place a call. Horrendous.

I've had similar problems with just Google Voice -- it will actually drop texts very frequently. I have to ask if the other person received my message, and they often have to resend messages. It's soooooo infuriating. And they seem to have no priority in fixing it.

Google Voice silently drops all MMS. So any multi-recipient text or any text with an attached pic will just not get to you and the sender will think you just didn't reply.

I ported my Google Voice number out to my cell phone which is a huge pain but it did work eventually.

At some point I believe they added photo messaging support by email, but you have to check + check for attachment. I had already filtered/archived all emails by default so I didn't realize this until very late in the game

Occasionally I get MMS messages via my email, no idea what the conditions are for this to work. I also have recently had instances of people asking why I did not respond to the MMS they had apparently sent me.

It's only supported with some carriers, such as sprint and t-mobile.

If you're signed in in more than one place at once, Hangouts just doesn't know what to do. I was sending messages to a friend from my phone, but her replies were only showing up on my desktop!

Bad management of multiple presences is a crying shame when one considers that Google Talk used XMPP which has that well solved...