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Google Is Discontinuing Google+ Hangouts On Air On September 12 (venturebeat.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the good-riddance dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Google today quietly announced that Google+ Hangouts On Air will no longer be available on September 12. Four weeks from now, Google users will be asked to use YouTube Live instead. Google first debuted the livestreaming feature for its Hangouts group video chat on Google+ back in September 2011, though it was only available to select performers and celebrities. Google started making Hangouts On Air available to all its users in May 2012, and completed the rollout a month later. But then in May 2013, Google debuted YouTube Live, which also gradually became available to more and more users.
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Google Is Discontinuing Google+ Hangouts On Air On September 12 More

Google Is Discontinuing Google+ Hangouts On Air On September 12

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  • One less thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15, 2016 @04:34PM (#52706857)

    And one step closer to the end of that piece of shit called Google+

    • G+: The Social Network for Sociopaths (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @04:52PM (#52707015)
      Google+ is (was?) a better designed and engineered alternative to Facebook, but it was marketed poorly. They positioned themselves as some kind of social network for cool tech people, forgetting that all the real cool tech people were already active with each other in their own online communities, You *had* to be on LinkedIn, because Business, and you *had* to be on Facebook, because Family, even if you weren't active in either, so you really, really needed a good reason to join another social network with strangers. And all that cringeworthy astroturfing and bought-and-paid-for testimonials by the those who were supposed to be our Nerd Leaders, such as Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, and Guy Kawasaki just made the whole thing a laughing stock.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dwedit ( 232252 )

        Making it INVITE ONLY killed it off before anyone could try it out.

        • Most things start as invite only and word of mouth only when they're new. Even Facebook did that in its infancy. This wasn't about exclusivity but about a slower and maintainable rollout. I've seen new products fail when they get inundated with too many users too soon then the word goes out that it's slow and down a lot.

        • Gmail was invite-only too for a long time. It didn't fail. The problem is google's standards for the success or failure of their products. If it doesn't dominate the market, they declare that a failure and discontinue it.

      • Re:G+: The Social Network for Sociopaths (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @07:12PM (#52707827) Journal

        Facebook = People I care about
        Google+ =Things I care about

        Facebook is filled with crap from people I care about. Most of it is crap / clickbait / memes and other "crap". It is really hard to filter all the crap from all the people I car about, but I still want to keep up with the People (the limited amount of non-crap items)

        Google+ has much better control over my feed. It is much better at filtering crap out. I want to see just "Photography" stuff, I open that Circle. Too Much spam from person A, they get removed from that circle.

        • You know, Facebook has lists, which are basically the equivalent of G+ circles - you can post to them and view posts from them. It's like having a whole separate newsfeed but just from those people. Dunno how many people use it but to me it's an invaluable feature.

      • Wanna know what killed G+ ? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rsborg ( 111459 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:03PM (#52708083) Homepage

        The real name policy was a complete turnoff.

        Oh, that and the fact that G+ conflated my "mission-critical" GMail, Voice, Wallet (mainly for Express), and other stuff with my personal life, where I could get banned for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

        Yeah, about the same kind of incentive mismatch as Apple Ping (where I had to worry if Apple's closeness with the music/movie industry meant I couldn't discuss torrents/etc).

        You have everything to lose (your Google identity) with G+, and little to gain - why should I bother?

      • I really did like Google+ the best. My major beef with the service was their real name requirement. Had they gotten rid of that (maybe require real names on the account but let people use "public names" that could be pseudonyms), then I know that I and a lot of other people would have used the service more.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • The last time I checked, they got rid of it by allowing a pseudonym but requiring that the person choose a public name that included their real name. So I could be "Jason Levine (Pseudonym)", "Jason (Pseudonym)", "Pseudonym (Jason Levine)", etc. Not really helpful if you didn't want your real name publicized.

            (Yes, I realize that there's something odd about me complaining about a real name policy when I use my real name on Slashdot. I signed up for this account years ago when I didn't care if my real name w

    • I like it. I'm not on Facebook but I hear it's better in every way except popularity. And popularity has never proven to correlate with quality. Given all these things dropping off, I'm worried they're going to drop G+ altogether. Which should not affect any of the haters whether it lives or dies, but I'll be stuck without an alternative.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Google Plus is actually pretty good.

      It's real mistake was Google screaming "GOOGLE PLUS" at you constantly and then demanding you use it if you want to continue using virtually every google service.

      It royally pissed people off and never recovered.

      Shame really.

    • Bring back iGoogle!

  • Why maintain a product (Score:3)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @04:38PM (#52706897)
    when you can just make something new that does exactly the same thing and annoy your users by forcing them to switch.

  • Google is killing a lot of products (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prograsm ( 1863096 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @05:09PM (#52707119)
    I feel like using Google products is becoming a bad idea, simply because you can expect it to be retired as soon as it becomes useful when they decide to make an identical product under the banner of choice of the moment, or simply kill it with no replacement product at all. This used to be disappointing, but Google does this so often it doesn't affect me any very much more because I won't even try most of their recent offerings knowing they won't keep it around. According to this article, I started avoiding Google's new offerings late 2011 or earlier.

    • Re:Google is killing a lot of products (Score:5, Insightful)

      by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @05:20PM (#52707189)

      I agree. Basically any product made by Google or purchased by Google means it will likely shut down in few years.

      So learning to use and/or switching to any of their products is kind of waste of time and effort that way.

      I do use some Google products(mostly Mail,Drive,Maps, Chrome and Android), but I do make sure I have all the information also outside their unreliable environments.

      Unreliable being the keyword.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • On the maps thing, I used to use paper maps from AAA exclusively 10 years ago when I lived in CA. But when I relocated to the East Coast, I had a sense that roads were nowhere as gridlike as they were either in LA or the Santa Clara Valley, so I bought my car w/ a built in GPS. Most of the places I frequently visit are there in the StarLink navigation history or favorites, which is how I find them. That thing was a godsend in Charlotte, Atlanta and now DC.

          I don't have a TV at home either, so on one of

  • What? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Monday August 15, 2016 @05:41PM (#52707331)

    Man, this is going to piss off a whole lot of podcasters and streamers I know about.... though the ones most dedicated to that abandoned the platform long ago due to complete abandonment and a whole lot of weird glitches, bugs and problems.

    But yeah... another proof that people just can't rely on Google to keep up their platforms or even develop them properly. They just keep releasing crap, abandoning development, and then shutting them down. Really doesn't inspire much confidence on the company.

  • "And nothing of value was lost."

  • Is this different from the Hangouts app on Android (Score:3)

    by Oloryn ( 3236 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:54AM (#52709933)
    So, is Hangouts on air different from the Hangouts app on Android? Or will the functionality of the Hangouts app shut down on Sep 12?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • What exactly is that? I remember when Google switched their messenger service to Hangouts, and to this day, I've resisted using it on the desktop. Just use it on my phone to force open a dialog window w/ a contact, and then continue the conversation on the computer. Is there a separate Hangouts on Google+ than there is for one's normal Google account?

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