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Google to merge Hangouts, Talk & Messenger

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:41:14 +0000

Google is working on unifying its various real-time messaging applications across all devices, and the result could be a unified messenger that allows you to do one-on-one chats as well as group video Hangouts. That’s the major news out of a session with the Google+ Hangouts team at Google I/O Wednesday afternoon.

Asked about why Google has multiple different services for video chat and messaging, including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and Google+ Hangouts, Google Product Manager Nikhyl Singhal admitted: “We have done an incredibly poor job servicing our users here.” Singhal said that Google doesn’t have anything to announce at this point, but that the company is definitely working on unifying all of these experiences.

Singhal and his colleague Chee Chew, who has been credited with inventing Google+ Hangouts, also shared a few more details about how Google uses Hangouts internally. The company uses video conferencing for virtually all of its meetings, and Singhal said that this has been completely switched to Hangouts as a video conferencing solution. “We do over 10,000 hangouts every day at Google,” he said.

So which other features are coming to Hangouts? Chew and Singhal didn’t share too many specifics, but said that they’re striving to make any Hangouts feature available on every supported device. This includes allowing mobile phone users to start a Hangout on Air, which will essentially bring mobile social live streaming to Google+ and YouTube.

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Hangouts become centerpiece of Google’s developer outreach

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 21:09:54 +0000

Updated. Google launched a new section of its developer site called Google Developers Live Tuesday that aims to be a central destination for third-party developers in need of help with their projects. At the center of these efforts are Google+ Hangouts, the company’s group video chat platform. Blogger turned Google+ Product Marketing Manager Louis Gray announced the site with a post on Google+, which read in part:

“Google I/O kicks off next week in San Francisco, putting Google Developers face to face with Google employees and other product experts for three full days. We’d like to bring that face to face experience to our developers year round.”

Google developer advocates and product managers have been using Hangouts quite a bit in recent months to reach out to developers and answer their questions face to face. Some of these weekly Hangouts have been used to dive into code examples, while others have invited third-party developers to share their experiences. Most of these Hangouts were only announced on Google+ itself, and developers had to follow the right people to hear about them in time to join live.

Update: Gray just sent us the following statement about the evolution of these office hours sessions:

“For the past several months, we have been hosting hangouts and office hours as a way to connect face to face with developers who build for Google products around the world. We have seen incredible engagement, with developers asking lots of great questions and gaining insight in how to create inspiring applications. Extending this personal connection between Google and our growing community of coders is exactly why we launched Google Developers Live, to extend this magic year round.”

The new site now aggregates all of these efforts, and makes them more widely available through Hangouts On Air, which means that each and every developer office hour will be available as a live stream to an unlimited audience.

Google opened up Hangouts on Air for everyone last month after making it available to select users last year. Google Engineering Director and Hangouts mastermind Chee Chew told me earlier this year that office hours are an ideal use case for Hangouts on Air, even when used in an academic context. “You may help one person, but you want to broadcast that out to the rest of the class so they can watch and learn at the same time,” he said.

Check out my entire interview with Chew below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Video: Google’s big plans for Hangouts On Air

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:13:20 +0000

Google will soon give everyone the ability to live stream their Google+ Hangouts to an unlimited audience, Google Engineering Director Chee Chew told me at the Social TV Summit in San Francisco Tuesday. Hangout video chats are currently limited to 10 participants. Only a few select users have been pre-approved to stream their Hangouts to a bigger group of viewers, something Google has been calling Hangouts On Air. “Our vision is for everyone on the planet to have access to On Air,” Chew said.

Chew told me that this type of interactive live streaming could be used by Occupy Wall Street protesters, couples who want to live stream their wedding to remote friends and college professors conducting public office hours. Check out my entire interview with Chew below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Hangouts was launched as part of Google+ last year and has since become a bit of a surprise hit. Chew’s comments seem to suggest that the platform could become key in Google’s and YouTube’s bigger plans to compete with live streaming platforms like Ustream and Livestream.

Google recently launched apps for Hangouts, allowing third-party developers to extend video chats with games, slideshows and flowcharts. Chew said that developers have been implementing things the Google team would have never thought of.

The same thing is true for Hangouts users and the way they have been adopting the platform: “We tuned the codec for voice,” Chew told me. “And then people started doing music over it, and playing concerts… people are really pushing the envelope.”

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