Google Is Beginning the Forced Migration From Hangouts To Chat Next Year (theverge.com) 40
Google will officially transition users from Google Hangouts to Google Chat starting next year. The Verge reports: As part of the change, Chat, a messaging service previously only available to customers who pay for Google Workspace (the recent rebranding of G Suite), will become a free service that's available inside of Gmail and in a standalone app. And some Hangouts features will be going away ahead of its disappearance. The transition from Hangouts to Chat will begin sometime in the first half of 2021, when Google will offer tools to help automatically bring your Hangouts conversations, contacts, and chat history to Chat, according to a blog post. It's unclear what steps will be required for that migration, but Google says it will share guidance at some point.
The switch from Hangouts to Chat will take place gradually, and there will be a period of time when both messaging services are still available. Eventually, all free users and Workspace customers will be moved over to Chat. Once that's done, then Chat will fully replace Hangouts. As for why you'd want to upgrade from Hangouts to Chat before you're forced to, there are both carrots and sticks. On the plus side, Google says Chat not only offers features like direct and group conversations you might be familiar with from Hangouts, but it can also let you more easily plan and collaborate with others. Google also announced that it is planning to remove some specific Hangouts features, such as the ability to manage texts and phone calls from Hangouts. They're also planning to remove Google Voice support from Hangouts early next year, as well as no longer letting you call phone numbers from Hangouts.
The switch from Hangouts to Chat will take place gradually, and there will be a period of time when both messaging services are still available. Eventually, all free users and Workspace customers will be moved over to Chat. Once that's done, then Chat will fully replace Hangouts. As for why you'd want to upgrade from Hangouts to Chat before you're forced to, there are both carrots and sticks. On the plus side, Google says Chat not only offers features like direct and group conversations you might be familiar with from Hangouts, but it can also let you more easily plan and collaborate with others. Google also announced that it is planning to remove some specific Hangouts features, such as the ability to manage texts and phone calls from Hangouts. They're also planning to remove Google Voice support from Hangouts early next year, as well as no longer letting you call phone numbers from Hangouts.
What's the point of using Google products? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of using Google products when you know that sooner or later they're going to stop working.
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Forced migration? Think somewhere between the Bataan Death March and The Trail Of Tears for IT administrators.
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I'm a retired IT guy and I think you're way out there.
I never allowed Google+ or Facebook or any of the major social media on my site.
I certainly wouldn't have a major cow over this.
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Re: What's the point of using Google products? (Score:1)
Stop questioning the new nobles. They will burn down our village if they think we lack loyalty.
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Every product dies. Not every product really lives. :-P
(RIP Wave and Reader)
It's often a valid complaint, but there is a replacement that integrates with the older platform here. If you include Google Talk and its transition, then you are already looking at over 15 years of support and its still going...
What other messaging service from 2005 are you still using? For some people, the answer is going to be IRC and XMPP which is a good argument for open protocols. But people prefer to let someone else run thei
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For some people, the answer is going to be IRC and XMPP which is a good argument for open protocols. But people prefer to let someone else run their infrastructure for them...
There's also Matrix [wikipedia.org] which is a newer federated protocol that is trying to avoid the fragmentation of XMPP's mess of extensions and is designed for modern asynchronous IM (i.e. smartphones) and voice/video support from the beginning. It is also end-to-end encrypted by default as of a few months ago. XMPP theoretically supports such things, but support is uneven.
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Matrix is only 6 years old so you definitely weren't using it when (the original) Google Chat launched. :-P
There are some compromises in the Matrix design, but I agree that it's a reasonable base for building a multi-decade communication product. I haven't seen it gaining momentum against really slick, proprietary solutions, but I'm always happier when I have the option to self host.
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I have a better idea Google.
How about I migrate away to not using any google messaging service anymore, since you can't decide what to call it, change it every 2-3 years, compete with yourself by offering 5+ of them at the same time, and then abandon them:
Talk
gChat
Duo
Allo
Hangouts
Hangouts Chat
Hangouts Meet
Chat
Android Messages
Why can't you just pick one, give it all the features, then *merge* the others into it?
Re: What's the point of using Google products? (Score:2)
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Because you're guaranteed that you can export your data in an open format and take it to your own casino [google.com], with blackjack and hookers? In fact, forget the data!
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I've been using Hangouts for years. Reason being that it "just works" and is lightweight, and my family and I already have Google accounts.
And really what is the alternative? Most of these services come and go, and the ones that don't grow into bloated crap or get heavily monetized like Skype.
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I have never used Hangouts and probably won't use Chat either.
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waah waaah wahh the free thing I used for years disappeared!
Meanwhile google search and gmail still endure. Guess your favorite social toy thing wasn't a hit, why should google prop it up?
What's chat? (Score:4, Funny)
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Of course not. The whole idea is to scam people with this quite little background app that runs all the time and data mines them, eww, just do dirty. You turn off your web browser but you will forget the chat program is running and watching and listening and (what ever is in there already and whatever they choose to force on you latter.
Seriously people, all your communications apps must be FOSS for you privacy and security. Accept reality, Google is worse than any government, far more abusive and unaccounta
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"Forced Migration ..." (Score:1)
... and the effects of climate change manifests itself.
XMPP (Score:1)
One of the early indications of the change from "Do No Evil" to "Be As Evil As Is Necessary To Make Money" was Google's removal of the ability to communicate outside the Google universe with federated XMPP. Once that happened, I ceased caring what they did with IM (or Chat or whatever it's called nowadays). I still miss the ability to communicate with my non-technical friends via XMPP, but that's the price of resisting, even if only in a small way, Google's ongoing takeover of the world.
as long as the xmpp side is still open (Score:4, Funny)
Chat includes familiar Hangouts features like direct and group messaging
I find it funny the most basic things of the internet like direct messaging, is being touted. Like, at this point, I wonder why we ever got off of IRC.
Re:as long as the xmpp side is still open (Score:4, Interesting)
Like, at this point, I wonder why we ever got off of IRC.
Freenode and Rizon and plenty of other public IRC servers are still quite busy. Comp.Misc and a few other Usenet forums still have active discussions and threads with virtually no spam anymore. A number of BBSes are still active, many with Telnet or SSH access so you don't need to dial in.
The older protocols that facilitated communication may not be as popular as what's currently more widespread, but that's the beauty of the 'old internet'. You can't fire up an installed copy of Google Talk or Buzz or Wave, and you can't go to their browser-based iterations, but there are IRC clients for basically every OS ever that will still happily allow you to connect to Freenode.
I can't argue with that Google has been more successful than pretty much anyone involved in IRC, but if a time traveler came back and told me that a working IRC server would be reachable in 2070 but Google wouldn't have a usable chat service, I'd believe them.
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Like, at this point, I wonder why we ever got off of IRC.
Freenode and Rizon and plenty of other public IRC servers are still quite busy. Comp.Misc and a few other Usenet forums still have active discussions and threads with virtually no spam anymore. A number of BBSes are still active, many with Telnet or SSH access so you don't need to dial in.
The older protocols that facilitated communication may not be as popular as what's currently more widespread, but that's the beauty of the 'old internet'. You can't fire up an installed copy of Google Talk or Buzz or Wave, and you can't go to their browser-based iterations, but there are IRC clients for basically every OS ever that will still happily allow you to connect to Freenode.
I can't argue with that Google has been more successful than pretty much anyone involved in IRC, but if a time traveler came back and told me that a working IRC server would be reachable in 2070 but Google wouldn't have a usable chat service, I'd believe them.
Agreed with all of that. The "we" in my comment was not some of us but *ALL* of us. Like, why isn't IRC the standard, defacto, primary way to "IM" as opposed to discord, slack, google talk, AIM, ICQ, MS Teams, etc. etc. etc.
It's good but it also sucks (Score:1)
My employer switched to Google Chat. The desktop app is just a browser window and not a true desktop app. This means that there are no chat alerts unless you enable Chrome's desktop alerts, which I do not because it comes with baggage. Additionally, you cannot minimize it to the system tray. The result is a permanent chat window floating around your desktop, that you have to periodically check for new messages rather than being alerted. At face value it is a good app, but the user experience is pretty poor
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The web app may be just a nice proof-of-concept of the chat API [google.com]. After all, it's chat, nothing that sophisticated or new.
Trail of Tears -- 1831 (Score:2)
Bataan Death March -- 1942
Hangouts to Chat -- 2020
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Google is Beginning the Forced Migration From Chat (Score:1)
Hangouts, Chat, Meet, ... ? (Score:2)
Chat (Score:1)
Repeating patterns.... (Score:2)
In the case of messaging technology, it just keeps happening everywhere, not just at Google.
10 Print "The way we are doing IM is wrong. We need to start afresh."
20 Goto 10
What is it about messaging technology that causes this cycle? Is there something fundamental about it that puts 20 Goto 10 in there?
Fi Customers (Score:2)