Project Failure

Storage isn’t the only thing that Google has been unifying lately. One of the biggest announcements at Google I/O this year was the official release of Hangouts. Google had been teasing some of the capabilities of Hangouts for a few months, and the project was called Babel at that time. It was going to be a complete overhaul of Google’s stagnating GTalk messaging platform.

A few people are upset about the fact that Google is moving away from the open XMPP standard that GTalk is based upon. Plenty of others, though, are simply happy to see some improvements to something that hadn’t been improved in quite awhile. Personally, I think if you’re going to be upset about anything you should be upset about the fact that Google confusingly chose to name this new platform the same as the video chat feature of Google+. Regardless, Google is using Hangouts to move away from the traditional instant message setup and instead have something more akin to the dedicated mobile messengers that act similar to SMS. You can use Hangouts like an IM service or you can use them like SMS, where answers are not necessarily expected almost immediately.

Hangouts also includes plenty of features that you would expect to see in any messaging app like Kik or WhatsApp, including group chats. It even has handy little indicators to allow you to track which part of the conversation was last read by each of the participants. As one would expect with the name of Hangouts, it supports video chat like the former Google+ Hangouts feature, too. I’ve confirmed it works silky smooth, even over a less than stellar cellular network. You just have to hope that you aren’t an AT&T subscriber.

Hangouts replaces the GTalk interface that you used to see in Gmail and Google+. My only real gripe about the service is that it has yet to replace the Google+ Messenger app on mobile devices. If I send a Hangouts message to a friend who doesn’t have the Hangouts app installed but who does have Google+ installed, they won’t see it in Google+ Messenger. It’s annoying because it means there is still a disconnect between some of the Google-offered avenues of communication. I’m hopeful that there will soon be an update to the Android and iOS Google+ apps that will remove the Messenger app completely. And if you’re a die-hard XMPP user there’s no need to become too worried just yet. Google has not shut down XMPP services, and you can still communicate with people on Hangouts via your XMPP client of choice; you just won’t get to take advantage of the new features.