
Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone - yarapavan
https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/
======
gregdoesit
Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts,
Google Duo and Google Chat?

Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo
before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more
importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same
features?

I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications
platform for this reason.

~~~
crazygringo
It has extremely valid market reasons.

Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but
never got _huge_ traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original
Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams.

So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those
being very separate communications channels with different priorities.
Hangouts could never be an awesome focused product if it had to be all things
to all people.

So the competitor to Facetime/WhatsApp/FB Messenger is Google Duo. It's
originally phone-based and designed primarily for 1-1, though it supports
small groups.

The competitor to Zoom and Teams is Google Meet. It's enterprise-based for
huge meetings.

The competitor to Slack is Google Chat.

And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but
never as well as any of the competitors, and still has moderate consumer usage
so they can't kill it, though I'm sure they're doing their best to figure out
how to get people to migrate eventually without losing them to a competitor in
the process.

So despite all the flak Google gets for a fragmented messaging ecosystem, it's
driven by _extremely_ valid market reasons.

And _Google_ isn't a video communications platform, it's a company. With
several platforms, serving several totally distinct markets.

~~~
numbsafari
Funny ... none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4
different products in order to operate in this space. Each of them is
expanding its reach and capabilities, coming from a place of strength.

Google is just practicing "me-too"-ism and not really trying to solve a
problem except some engineer is bored and some product person thinks these
tools could become a threat to ad dollars if allowed to grow "unchecked".

Google owns YouTube (which you forgot to include YouTube Hangouts On Air).
Google absolutely is a video comms company.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram are all run by Facebook and have
variously incompatible messaging capabilities.

~~~
kristofferR
Sure, but Facebook didn't name them Facebook Groupchat, Facebook Chat and
Facebook Talk.

People actually understand the difference between the various Facebook
products, unlike the Google products.

~~~
olyjohn
When I ask people what Instagram is for, they always describe it as Facebook,
but without all the crap. Or as Facebook with posts sorted chronologically.
Doesn't make me want to sign up with it, and end up with another Facebook.

------
fraencko
I use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for
business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound,
connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my
opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google
Calendar is also a big plus.

One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles
and the hang up button are blended in and out on moving the mouse cursor
during a call. I'd prefer to at least have the option to let the toggles stay
onscreen as I tend to use the mute mic toggle a lot during a meeting. Also
there is a moment of awkwardness every time a call ends because many
participants look for the end call button.

It's a great thing that I can use my Smartphone as a mic during a meeting.
Would be great if this could be expanded to my phones' cam as a webcam
replacement.

~~~
CydeWeys
> One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute
> toggles and the hang up button are blended in and out on moving the mouse
> cursor during a call. I'd prefer to at least have the option to let the
> toggles stay onscreen as I tend to use the mute mic toggle a lot during a
> meeting.

Could not agree more. Also, the shortcuts to mute audio and video are multiple
key combinations and differ across platforms (i.e. using the command button on
MacOS and Ctrl on other OSes). Why can't they be a single key, like M to
mute/unmute audio and C for the camera? Heck, maybe even use spacebar for
mute/unmute since it's _that_ key of a feature?

~~~
marcusjt
This handy Chrome extension makes Meet work via a push-to-talk using the
spacebar, with many config options
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-
push-t...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-push-to-
talk/pgpidfocdapogajplhjofamgeboonmmj)

But why doesn't Meet have these features already...?! ️

------
petters
I left Google and the Meet team a while ago. Would have been great to
experience this 30x growth though! Being oncall these days would have been
interesting.

I have used Meet a lot both personally and professionally this spring and I
think it's great. Been waiting for this announcement!

~~~
tehlike
I'm a loyal user of hangouts.

------
alec
I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about
this because the video/audio quality is much higher.

When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if
there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993.

In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6
people at that resolution.

I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to
people.

~~~
Fiahil
I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my
facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

The tech is not interesting, the UX is less interesting than Zoom or webex.
The first hangout version was far more exciting than Google Meet, Duo or
Latest-Hangouts.

Like every other industry, Google lost its ability to push boundaries forward
and act as a beacon for innovation. "Higher resolution" is definitively not
innovation.

~~~
aikinai
> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my
> facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

Do you meet people in person?

~~~
maps7
It's not really the same is it? Your face appearing an unknown size/quality to
however many people are at the other end is a different experience.

------
jpkeisala
> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join
> meetings created by individual accounts.

If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.

~~~
londons_explore
Agreed.

While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring
an account to _join_ a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users
will use another platform.

The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both
sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get
into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?".

It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google
accounts (for their work), so when testing this out, never encountered the
issue.

I predict they'll change their stance in a few months when they see zoom still
crushing them in user numbers, but by then it'll be too late - people will
remember meet as that app which is "finicky to get to connect because everyone
has to remember their password"

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _" finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their
> password"_

Speaking of that, my last experience with Google Meet in business setting was
this: every other meeting someone from our team would disappear in the middle
of a call and reappear a minute later. Reason? Google's bullshit random "you
need to re-verify yourself and type in your password NOW NOW NOW!" prompt that
logs you out until you comply. Since us developers only used our company
GSuite accounts for Meet calls (all communication unfortunately went through
Slack), the only time we'd get this prompt would be a few minutes into the
call.

~~~
londons_explore
Can someone from the gaia team change the default cookie validity period down
by 20 minutes (ie. from 30 days to 29 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes) to resolve
this issue?

~~~
TeMPOraL
As silly as it sounds, it would probably resolve this issue perfectly. As I
remember, I always got the login prompt at roughly the exact same time into
the meeting, suggesting it's just set to expire after a certain amount of
whole days.

~~~
londons_explore
Google internally is well aware of this, and in fact one internal tool most
engineers use actually has an expiry a few hours short of 24h simply to
prevent exactly this issue.

~~~
metal13
But it's not fixed because....?

------
grandinj
I don't have the mental space to waste filling it with details of another
Google communication product they are going to discontinue in a year.

~~~
kartayyar
Google products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they
don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants.

And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of
"but they might discontinue it." \- the utility is immediate in terms of the
calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

~~~
jedberg
> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of
> "but they might discontinue it." \- the utility is immediate in terms of the
> calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each
one has a Zoom link in it.

If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a
new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update.

They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people
reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes for
them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.

And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.

~~~
cameronbrown
> Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and
> each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to
> redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed
> the update.

If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by
default.

> They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people
> reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes
> for them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.

That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.

> And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.

What stops you from having both so you can try both? Those Zoom links aren't
obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.

~~~
jedberg
> If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by
> default.

For a new event, yes. For an existing event, I'd have to replace the existing
Zoom link.

> That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.

You're assuming the person I want to meet with already has a Google account.

> What stops you from having both so you can try both? Those Zoom links aren't
> obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.

Because of the confusion I mentioned before. You'll end up with some people in
the old meeting and some in the new.

I speak all of this from experience of being in a corporate environment that
moved from WebEx to Hangouts. It took weeks to get everyone to switch over and
was a ton of work updating all the recurring meetings.

But the overall point is that the switching cost is much higher than just the
time boxed meeting.

~~~
eitally
You don't need a Google account to join a Meet meeting.
[https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069?co=GENIE.Plat...](https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en)

Re: your corporate switching experience ... this is a failure of the company
culture, not a technology problem.

------
cube2222
I've been using Google meet as a remote student for a while (Google made meet
available for free for education accounts a while ago already) and it's been a
great experience, even with large groups of people online. We tested up to ~80
without any problems.

~~~
leoh
Just was in a meeting with literally 250 people today, was really impressed
how it held up.

------
sneak
> _We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join
> meetings created by individual accounts._

Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone
number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with
it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing
Google cookies and your IP.

Demanding that your communications partners dox themselves to Google to talk
with you is incredibly rude.

~~~
DrScump

      it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number
    

I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile
device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was
mandatory.

~~~
thsealienbstrds
Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a
short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security
reasons.

~~~
hknd
no it's always optional - they recommend adding one to be able to retrieve a
lost/hacked account

~~~
bonoboTP
It depends on their risk assessment based on all sorts of stuff (perhaps like
your IP, browser info, mouse movements etc.). If you're suspicious (VPN, Tor,
heuristics etc.), they require the phone confirmation.

~~~
lucb1e
Can confirm, I can create a google account on android without phone number but
I cannot do so on desktop. When using the android-created account on desktop,
it requires (not optional) a phone number.

A phone number on a fully functional google account isn't optional, at least
in western Europe (though I doubt another country is better because then
people would just VPN to there).

I once did some work for Google that required accounts to do the project
(existing accounts weren't a good fit for the project). They couldn't provide
us with accounts because it was a huge hassle and another team, so I ended up
standing in line for a long time getting my identity verified a half dozen
times for various prepaid sim cards with throwaway phone numbers and I think
we billed them for it. If there had been another way, they'd simply have told
us...

------
mr_gibbins
They're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been
drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover
breadsticks.

Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's
got any reason to use your product.

~~~
disillusioned
Google Meet has 100M daily active users... and they're adding 3 million users
a day. I don't... think the party is over. Those of us using GSuite appreciate
not having to also pay for Zoom, and use it religiously. And its conference
room hardware is nice, too. Plus, it's tightly integrated into Google
Calendar.

------
amyjess
When we went all-WFH in March, my company switched to Meet for almost all of
our meetings (though some use WebEx), and it's fantastic. Audio quality is
great, nobody has trouble connecting, etc.

------
llarsson
Ok, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely _new_ service,
or just re-branded Hangouts?

When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a
Meet, when it used to be a Hangout.

My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is
Meet actually good/better?

~~~
disillusioned
Your confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet
was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and
entirely different service.

Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice
call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and
is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong
video/voice performance, up to 250 attendees, dial-in numbers, live
transcriptions, recordings, screen sharing, etc.

They rebranded it as Google Meet literally two weeks ago. They are killing
Hangouts Classic. They have... also spun up Google Chat (formerly Hangouts
Chat) which is... a pseudo-competitor to Slack, and an evolution of Hangouts,
but only for GSuite users, with the intent of killing Hangouts Classic (the
evolution of GTalk) early next year.

Meet is far more advanced and better supported that the legacy Hangout for a
conferencing tool. It is far better, and we really prefer it. (Though, because
it also bears mentioning, Google is ALSO working on Duo, which is their
CONSUMER video chat program, which has some neat features, like AI audio gap-
filling and super-low-bandwidth AV1 codec benefits, which I hope make the jump
over to Meet soon...)

~~~
llarsson
Thank you for listing an ecosystem of services that, from my point of view,
seem to be overlapping quite a bit.

I hope they can prune or merge some of it, because it sounds exhausting: do I
as a GSuite user talk with an external person (say, for a job interview) over
a Meet or a Duo or a Hangout Classic... and what are the privacy policy
implications of such a choice? Too exhausting!

~~~
perennate
I hope they don't prune Hangouts, but if they do then at least I can delete my
Google account since it won't be of much use anymore.

------
DerWOK
No end-to-end encryption plus forced Google Mail registration preventing
anonymity. Yawn, Google. Yaaawn!

~~~
travbrack
Meet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee.
Is there a service that can do that?

~~~
m12k
How come this is hard to do with 100 participants? Not a crypto or video
encoding expert, but I'd have thought each participant would have a decryption
key for their stream, and this key they would transfer to others by encrypting
it separately with each other participant's public key and then broadcast that
bundle to everyone. Thus everyone else can decrypt only their entry in that
bundle using their private key, and gain access to the shared decryption key
for that individual stream. When a new person joins, they add their public key
to the central list of public keys, and request that everyone update their
bundle to include an entry encrypted with their public key. So basically, from
the perspective of the new joiner, each stream would be encrypted until that
streamer had updated their bundle to allow the newcomer access to their
decryption key. But each streamer would still only need to encrypt their
stream once, and then share access to the decryption key only to participants.
Scaling wise, sending only incurs the cost of encrypting once - though as a
receiver, you'd need to decrypt N streams using N different keys - but is that
much harder to do than decoding N video streams in the first place?

~~~
joshuamorton
Consider resolution. With non encrypted video, you receive one hd stream. With
100 people, you'd need 100x the bandwidth, and supporting things like
highlighting speaking people would need to be done client side.

~~~
m12k
I honestly thought that was the case already (that highlighting is happening
client side, and that my client receives each stream separately). So what
you're saying is that currently a central server is performing the task of
merging those 100 streams into a single stream for users. So it needs to do
this separately for each user configuration of how they want to see the
streams?

~~~
EGreg
1\. Basically, in a peer to peer topology you’d have 100x99 streams going.
Everyone sending to everyone.

2\. With a star topology and a central SFU you have 99x2 connections only.
Much less bandwidth being used. The economics is that everyone pays the
central server.

3\. Now, I would wager there is a way to do some sort of sparser version of
option 1 with beefy peers playing the part of “supernodes”. I think that’s how
skype used to work before M$ bought them and made it less P2P

But regarding the encryption, yes you can have an SFU or whatever but you
won’t have adaptive resolution of the SFU or supernodes can’t decrypt your
stream in transit.

------
threatofrain
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017478)

------
newscracker
I have never used Google Meet, and don’t intend to use it now either. Anyone
who wants to have just a group video or voice call with others (close people
or acquaintances or strangers) can use Jitsi Meet (meet.jit.si). Jitsi Meet
can also be self hosted if you prefer that. Jitsi Meet doesn’t require
registration for anyone.

We need to promote getting out of the Google and Facebook webs.

------
throwaway123x2
Google has yet to build a chat tool better than the old GChat / GoogleTalk-
Gmail integration. It had voice and video (though not amazing quality, but it
was 2006) and the chat was top-notch. It worked, it was integrated in my Gmail
and it had text statuses which was honestly the best social media I ever used
in my college days.

~~~
sixothree
When they took that away it affected who I communicate with.

~~~
CydeWeys
Same. I still miss Google Talk. It was the pinnacle of instant messaging,
following and improving upon AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo which preceded it. I used it
with Pidgin.

It's all been downhill from there, now that everything is just a web app and
you don't have an application that can sit in your systray and open its own
windows.

------
geppetto
Good news for all the school people that has been using it for learning
purposes only (eg my students). That said there are good alternatives already
like jitsi or - time limit apart - zoom.

------
Wowfunhappy
> Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:

> • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join
> meetings created by individual accounts.

So, all participants need to create Google accounts. How convenient for
Google.

I don't necessarily want to ascribe maliciousness here—there are certainly
user-centric reasons to set it up this way. But, isn't it interesting how many
of the security measures implemented by tech companies also just happen to
align with their business interests in other ways?

~~~
bdcravens
Freedom and privacy are often at odds with security in most areas in life.
During war-like situations, security (speaking in the general sense, rather
than purely technical) becomes a greater concern, so those companies that have
positioned themselves that way will have increased opportunities.

~~~
jplayer01
There are other solutions around authentication that would be perfectly fine
and still privacy-conscious. It's just that anything other than forcing you to
login using a Google account doesn't mesh with their strategy of ensnaring
users and adding to their all-encompassing profile of you.

------
Traster
This is great, did they list the financial commitments they made to keeping
this product running for a minimum of 10 years? Because I don't see why anyone
would migrate to a Google product. If you start using Zoom today, you've got a
fair expectation that it will be around for a while. If you start using
Microsoft Teams you can be extremely confident it'll be around for heat death
of the universe. If you start using Google Meet today, I'd advise you to have
a backup plan.

~~~
benhurmarcel
Meet isn't a type of product that takes effort to migrate from. It's per
meeting.

Also, it's part of G Suite that they sell to companies, so it shouldn't be
discontinued anytime soon. For free for consumer however, nothing guaranteed.

~~~
Traster
When I've got a calendar full of meetings and they all have meeting links in
them then yes, migrating away is going to be a pain- and that's assuming that
they just EOL the product, and don't do what they've traditionally done which
is to try and force you into one of their other crappy products. I still
remember when every youtuber got forced into Google+. Youtube is per video!
How bad could it be! Turns out, pretty bad.

------
lasky
Javier Soltero has a long history of getting useful shit built well and in
people’s hands, quickly. Nice to see him still at it, not hampered by even
Google’s bureaucracy.

------
koolba
> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join
> meetings created by individual accounts.

Is it considered acceptable use to create a throwaway Google account specific
for this service?

It’s be nice to have a video chat platform not controlled by China for the
common man but I wouldn’t want my personal social activity on it to be
directly linked to any real Google account.

------
reustle
I use Meet many times per day for business and I'm very ready to move to
something else. I am constantly hit with the issue where a user clicks the
"ask to join" button, but the hosts nor anyone else ever sees a pop-up to
admit them into the room. Super frustrating when on a phone call with a client
trying to get Meet to work.

------
ProAm
Why would people give meeting information, content, participants list to be
parsed and advertised against to Google?

------
ciguy
Does this give better sound quality? Because the sound quality on meet (Or is
it Hangouts?) has been abysmal for the last few years. I also have no idea
what meet actually even is these days. Is it just a rebranded hangouts or did
they add something and merge Hangouts in?

~~~
izacus
I've used it and never noticed bad call quality and it performed pretty much
very similar to Zoom. Not needing an installed app is a huge bonus.

~~~
londons_explore
Zoom doesn't require an app, they just hide the link to use the web version
pretty well.

You have to click to download the app, then cancel the download, and the link
to join via browser appears.

~~~
qmarchi
There's an asterisk to that. There was a not insignificant chunk of time that
Zoom had to disable their web client, which was a pain...

------
aloukissas
Google Meet is fine, but it's lacking a native app on desktop. Google being
Google, my bet is that they'll never make one, and that's a pity. Some prefer
not installing apps, but many like this separation. Think zoom, slack, teams,
etc.

------
verdverm
Just tried out this Tactiq extension which will save the Closed Captions.
Freaking sweet! Instantly the new standard for our meetings.

[https://tactiq.io/](https://tactiq.io/)

------
AzzieElbab
Can't wait to install another app that does the same thing as 99 other apps on
my phone. I mean, it good for everyone, right? A hundred apps with same
functionality that I need to run simultaneously because people are using all
of them, that should do something for higher end phones

------
corobo
Google's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd
fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as
fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle.

Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G

~~~
mav3rick
Maybe if Zoom farted correctly it wouldn't be mired in bad PR about security.

~~~
corobo
Unfortunately the masses aren’t really phased by internet security issues

------
kleiba
Yay, more free training data for Google's ASR and computer vision algorithms!

------
gchokov
Another Google service that I will not use because of privacy concerns.

~~~
techntoke
You can use Zoom and have them install backdoors and give your information to
Facebook.

~~~
lucb1e
... or Wire or Jitsi or Signal or Jami or one of a dozen others. Heck, even
WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams are preferable to these two.

But yeah let's single out the only alternative that's actually worse and give
that as counter-example.

~~~
techntoke
You can't even compare 100+ group video chat services to 1:1 or 1:10 video
chat solutions.

------
say_it_as_it_is
It's as if a world of people have chosen to ignore how Google makes billions
of dollars a year. Choosing Google rather than Zoom for privacy's sake doesn't
address these concerns.

Nothing is free, especially when Google is providing the service. You are the
product.

How are you the product with Google Meet? I can speculate, based on how it
monetizes information in its other products. Google is processing all of the
conversations through its deep learning systems, harvesting insights about
everything discussed.

This heightens privacy concerns 100x from whatever Zoom was attempting.

Where are the activist blog posts about this? They don't exist because Google
surveillance has been normalized. It's ok if Google does it.

~~~
xuki
Google and FB could charge for this in the future, but for now they have to go
with the free option. Nobody will switch from Zoom to their offers if it costs
the same amount of money.

