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Google Communications

Google Hangouts' New Features Make Work Meetings Slightly Less Annoying (cnet.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the remember-google-talk? dept.
Google is rolling out two new features in its communication and messaging app, Hangouts. From a report: (Unfortunately, neither tools help decrease the utterances of such phrases like "How will this scale?" and "Run it up the flagpole.") The first is a video conferencing feature called Hangouts Meet. Meet allows people to hop on meetings via a web link through their laptops or mobile app. This link can be shared in an email or directly through a Google Calendar invite. Colleagues who are traveling without Internet can use a dedicated dial-in phone number. The second feature is Hangouts Chat, which lets coworkers message each other in dedicated chat rooms.
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Google Hangouts' New Features Make Work Meetings Slightly Less Annoying More

Google Hangouts' New Features Make Work Meetings Slightly Less Annoying

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  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Never heard the phrase "run it up the flagpole" but if you find the question "how will this scale?" annoying, you may want to choose a new line of business.

      The full phrase is "let's run this up the flagpole and see who salutes", i.e., let's propose this and see if they buy it. It's a very overused turn of phrase. Say something clever like "let's pass out these matches at the kindergarten and see who ends up in the burn ward".

    • Never heard the phrase "run it up the flagpole" but if you find the question "how will this scale?" annoying, you may want to choose a new line of business.

      Indeed. It's a primary question you need to answer when proposing any new technology or solution.
      If you ask me how my stuff scales, I'll give you the area/power/performance tradeoffs that are available in the design parameterization.

    • At the end of the day, I don't hear "how will this scale" all that much.

    • Never heard the phrase "run it up the flagpole" but if you find the question "how will this scale?" annoying, you may want to choose a new line of business.

      Couldn't you catch this kind of thing with the obscenity filter?

  • GotoMeeting and webex (Score:4, Informative)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @03:34PM (#54008527)

    have had this for years.

    • Yes, apparently they're repositioning Hangouts as a product. Instead of being Google's competitor to Apple's consumer-grade Facetime and Messages, they're positioning it as a business-grade competitor to WebEx and Slack.
    • Zoom has it too.

    • Yes, but on a desktop computer both GoToMeeting and WebEx required you to open full sized windows before you would be able to access the associated chat room. In other words, the chat room was only secondary to the actual video/audio conferencing, and the chat room history would get reset each time there was a new meeting.

      And last but not least, GoToMeeting and WebEx didn't have a super cool sounding one syllable brand name associated with that feature. Speaking of which, a cool name for that product on GoT

    • Not to mention any enterprise who have office will likely have the same thing already in the form of Lync or Skype for Business, and then at least it's under control of the sysadmin.

    • One major difference could be that Hangouts is still free?

  • The phrase "hop on" is vastly more infuriating than either of those canards. It's a reliable tell that the person who's using it doesn't have to do any stateful work that gets derailed in an environment of constant pointless interruptions.

  • Nonsense (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Google Hangouts" and "Less Annoying" should NEVER be in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Allow me to correct myself:

      "Just about any other product is less annoying than Google Hangouts."

    • Agreed... Wonder if they'll ever get around to adding a reasonable status feature, such as the ability to specify "Do Not Disturb." Oh, who am I kidding?

  • Except for Gmail Google services are a joke (Score:4, Interesting)

    by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @03:43PM (#54008597)

    I had my business listing show up on the side and at top of search when people searched online for a service like mine in my area. This was for Google business/maps or whatever the hell they call it every 6 months. Had a good Google+ page. Use to get quite a few calls from my shop showing up on the search. Then one day it just disappeared. I got a bit busy with the shop for a few months and was like ok someone did a better job then me and got listed first now BUT not so, somewhere again Google changed their fucking Local Business crap and fully deleted my shop from their social media shit services and maps. When I logged in it stated my listing was removed for some violation which they wont tell you what it is, as they say it might help people to game the system.

    When you submit a review it asks you to link to the page on Google maps/Business BUT when they remove it there is no link as its all been deleted by them.

    Anyways after going WTF it was easier to just deleted the whole account and start over.

    • Even GMail sucks. Our sorry story:

      Off to Italy, having done our communications and reservations, etc. with a GMail account.

      Arrived in Rome and attempted to use it to provide/get further information.

      Oh noes! You're using your account from a different location! Nobody ever travels or gets a GMail account to be universally (earthily?) accessible!

      You must send us your cell phone number (we don't have one) or your home e-mail address so we can ask for confirmation. We can't access that. In fact, we used a G

  • Wait, what's changed then? Text based chats have been around forever. I've been using Hangouts to add people via phone numbers for years. So now the hangout has the ability to dial into it? So they just added the opposite connection direction? Is that literally it? Because as far as URL goes, you've always been able to send someone the URL of a Hangout once it is started, and anyone can join that way without a formal invite inside of the hangout. Additionally, Hangouts have already supported calendars this

    • Hangouts has been a single unified app that gives consumer-grade IM, voice calls, and video conferencing. They're now splitting the functionality into two products: an audio/video conferencing app, and a text-based chat app. Further, each of those applications are have features added in the hopes of competing with existing business-grade solutions. The audio/video conferencing is getting some features to put it more in line with WebEx, while the text-based chat is being changed to be more like Slack.

      Tha

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nasch ( 598556 )

      Can you join a hangouts meeting without signing in to a google account? It sounds like that will be possible with this new feature. Or if that is possible today then yeah I don't see what the new feature is besides dialing in.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rot16 ( 4603585 )
        The dialing in thing probably is not new, I saw LibreOffice design team using it over a year ago. That said, I am not entirely sure if that was standard feature or some smart fellow doing the thing.

  • If it has a Bullshit Bingo app that also keeps scoring, bonus if it uses the mike to listen to the drivel the markedroid drones on about and make sure nobody cheats.

    NEWSFLASH, managers and markedroids: Nobody gives half a shit about your speeches in meetings. "Can we bring our laptops to your presentation so we can do some meaningful work while you hold your speech?" is the ONLY honest question you'll EVER be asked by a tech when it comes to your presentation.

    • Also, a big clock that starts a 3-minute count down as soon as it recognizes a new voice would be great.

      Or a "mumble meter" that would tell the mopes camping the local meeting in the background to speak the fuck up.
  • How in God's name is that supposed to make meetings less annoying?
  • In a business climate where corporate espionage can be so damaging, I can't understand the decision to use hangouts and give your proprietary knowledge to Google. Imagine what they could know about the internal workings of corporations just by scanning meetings.

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