Mashable

Google Hangouts App: One Giant Leap for Talk Kind

Mitts up if you’ve ever been in this situation: You commence a conversation with a friend or family member at your desk on Instant Messenger. Away from your desk, you send them a text. Later on, you determine it makes more sense to speak face-to-face on Skype.

All of a unexpected, you’ve got a balkanized conversation. And it’s far, far worse if you’re attempting to involve numerous people. You quickly get to the point where you can’t reminisce who said what to whom on what service on what device.

Wouldn’t it be lighter if it was all unified — if there was one conversation app to rule them all, on PC, tablet and mobile? Where you could pick up the conversation whenever, no matter what the platform, no matter what the year?

Guess Who?

Google has long been in a ideal position to predominate the field of talk. The Hangouts service is the gold standard of movie messaging. It’s exceptionally effortless to add up to ten people to a talk, and more importantly, to do joy stuff with them — share your screen, observe a movie together, even wear foolish hats and disguises.

Never has a more powerful chunk of face-recognition tech been used for a more whimsical purpose. Google understands that wherever groups gather for social reasons, they need something to do. You need conversation chunks. You need the joy stuff. (In that vein, the company has created eight hundred fifty fresh hand-drawn emoji for Hangouts’ text talk feature.)

I’ve attempted talking with my family on Skype and iChat; both tend to slow down or break down, and a pleasant conversation devolves into a tech-support session. Google Hangouts just work. (Well, nine times out of ten ain’t bad.)

Until the company launched a standalone Google Hangouts app Wednesday, it was effortless to be unaware of your option to Hangout on mobile. This was because you had to do it via the Google+ app. Mountain View doesn’t miss an chance to shove its social network on you. And that kept a entire blast of less tech-savvy users — read, parents — at bay.

But to Google’s credit: Now that it has determined to thrust Hangouts as a standalone service, it’s pushing its capabilities to the limit. Facebook has talk goes; Google just vaulted to the head of the talk world. All that’s missing is SMS and iMessage integration. But it’s already kicking off to look like those services, at least.

Paradigm Shifts

Take a look at any SMS conversation. Your stream of texts with a given person never stops. The conversation may be infrequent, but it can go on forever. It thinks of talk as an infinite scroll.

It’s odd that one of the creakiest talking technologies in the world — plain old SMS, invented in one thousand nine hundred ninety two — showcased the way to the future of talk, but this is what seems to have happened. Facebook Messages picked up on the text-stream idea a while back. By adding movie and photos, Google just leap-frogged them.

Now Hangouts never end; they just pause. The movie talks live on, their times recorded, in a stream of communication. In this stream, you’ll find seamless integration of Gchat messages. You can be talking via Hangout on your iPhone, and what you just said will instantly pop up in your Gmail window.

You can share photos, and know they’ll always be there in the social stream of your Hangout with a particular person at a particular time. This means the Hangouts app constitutes a credible alternative to Flickr, Instagram or Path; it’s lighter to find your photos if you reminisce who you sent them to.

(Sure, the photos technically live on Google+, but you can securely disregard that fact.)

On Hangouts for the iPhone, you can switch back and forward inbetween movie and Gchatting (or Google Talking, or whatever you want to call it). Which means Google just did an end-run around one Apple product — FaceTime — while also making irrelevant many IM apps in the Apple ecosystem. My beloved was IMO; now I have to consider whether I’ll ever be using that app again.

Of course, you can most likely guess the downside to all this. Say it with me now:

Privacy Problem

Recall how you could go off the record in Gchat? Well, you can still do that, but you can no longer make it the default for every talk. A lil’ note on a support page was added Wednesday, and it said this:

We’ve made a switch to the Google Talk and Google Talk talk history settings. You can turn individual talks off the record, but you’ll no longer have the option to make talking off the record the default setting for all of your talks.

Google, it seems from this typically roundabout way of delivering controversial feature switches, wants to nudge you into having a recorded history. It encourages you to see the Hangout as a softer, more social kind of stream — almost like Facebook Timeline.

What do you think? Will you download the app? How will you use it? Let us know in the comments.

Pic via Justin Sullivan/Getty Photos

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