Google Postpones Shutdown of Hangouts For G Suite Users (theverge.com) 13
Google will let G Suite customers continue to use Hangouts until next year, delaying a shutdown of the service that was supposed to begin in October. Hangouts will now stay around for business customers until at least next June. The Verge reports: The shutdown will move customers of Google's business-focused G Suite subscription over to a pair of new chat services: Hangouts Chat, a Slack competitor; and Hangouts Meet, a video conferencing service. While the services generally include the same functionality (and more), people are pretty used to Hangouts, and Google says it's heard from companies' IT teams that they'd "like more time to migrate [their] organizations from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat."
Google says it now plans to start transitioning all G Suite users over to the new services by the end of next year. To make the transition easier, Google says it's going to work on adding more features to classic Hangouts. Right now, classic Hangouts users can only directly message a Hangouts Chat user. In the future, Google suggests that classic users may be able to view or participate in group chats, too.
Google says it now plans to start transitioning all G Suite users over to the new services by the end of next year. To make the transition easier, Google says it's going to work on adding more features to classic Hangouts. Right now, classic Hangouts users can only directly message a Hangouts Chat user. In the future, Google suggests that classic users may be able to view or participate in group chats, too.
About to give up on Google... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's services are too much of a moving target that one wonders what service will be shuttered next.
No wonder they can't get messaging right despite having the "best engineers" anyone can have.
I am about to throw in the towel...what was the reason they fronted for this change in the first place?
Re: About to give up on Google... (Score:4, Funny)
Google stopped caring about having the "best engineers" around the time they decided to become overtly evil.
What they have now is an army of H1Bs doing the needful. Commanded by a clique of silverspoon Social Just-Us Nazis who graduated from Ivy League schools but weren't bright enough to get real jobs on Wall St.
Re:About to give up on Google... (Score:5, Insightful)
For chat specifically, they were initially building things of top of open-source technology, namely Jabber, in an effort called Google Talk.
They extended Jabber with their own voice and video protocol.
They provided the best Jabber platform in the world with interoperability with all other Jabber networks.
Then at some point they decided to close down their gateways and close down their network to just GTalk users.
Then they decided to just scrap GTalk and rewrite everything as Hangouts. Building tech based on open-source wasn't in line with Google's culture anymore, so they had to rewrite it with Google's internal stack. It was shit for a while but eventually Hangouts ended up being pretty decent.
Then, for some stupid reasons, they started trying to re-invent their apps thinking they were providing the wrong functionality limiting how wide of an audience they can reach. After all, new apps keep popping up and getting large market share, often larger than Google.
So they kept on releasing more crap: Duo (Facetime rip-off), Allo (Whatsapp rip-off), Hangout Meet (Zoom rip-off), Hangout Chat (Slack rip-off)... Even though they had a unified superior solution all along.
Now someone has decided Hangouts isn't needed anymore and that people should be usong their flavour-of-the-month crap instead. I think it's time to say goodbye to Google.
Re: About to give up on Google... (Score:4, Informative)
It's been time to say goodbye for a long time. They're too unreliable for building anything on top of. That's a deal breaker, no matter if they're big enough to theoretically provide stable service.
Re: (Score:2)
Jabber sucked though. No end-to-end encryption being the biggest flaw. Also it only supported sending binary data in base64 encoded format with an XML wrapper, so file sizes ballooned.
They couldn't win with it. If they added encryption people would have whined about them trying to make Jabber proprietary. The standards body looking after it was moving extremely slowly. They gave up on it because it was crap.
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The thing we found the stupidest about Hangouts is, Google doesn't believe in Online/Offline. They wanted this to be a multi-platform solution that behaves like a cell phone application (Windows 8 and Ubuntu Uni
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I've been using hangouts daily for over a year. What good alternatives are there that work in the browser (no extra software needed), offer decent security and are free?
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I have no clue.
Especially as the current Hangouts was basically a Slack competitor AND a videoconferencing service.
G thang (Score:1)
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No. That's the G-Spot.
Hangouts, indeed... (Score:3)
Hangouts came pre-installed on my phone. My entire experience of it consists of spam messages from (supposedly) girls who (supposedly) just want to let it all, well, hang out.
At least, that was my entire experience of it until one attempted a video call at 3am, just last night. I've shut the damn thing down before Google got round to it.
Such a shame. I did enjoy dragging the "look at me in my cute dress" photo into TinEye and sending them the *last* photo in the porn shoot they stole it from...
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