

Hangouts now available in Gmail, Google+ account not required - patrickaljord
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/07/video-chat-with-whole-team-with.html

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eoghan
Google Hangouts is a surprisingly, truly amazing product, marred by its
relationship with Google+.

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mtgx
How would it work in your ideal world?

Even if you don't want to use Google+, why can't you think of it as just
another account you have to make. Imagine Hangouts was a great stand-alone
product made by a start-up. You'd still need a whole different account to use
that stand-alone Hangouts product.

So I'd suggest just looking at it like that, if you really don't want anything
to do with the whole Google+ part of Hangouts. Plus, it looks like Google
wants to make Hangouts work in more of their services than just Google+, and I
think that's a great idea. They could probably implement Hangouts in a lot of
their other products, to get people to "video socialize" around them, and
maybe build fun ways to use it with those other products.

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danmaz74
Can't answer for the OP, but for me it would be super-convenient if I could
launch a hangout from Google Talk.

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zheng
...not quite. The hangout backend will now power all video calls, but to do
more than a 1-on-1 chat, you will still need a G+ profile.

Interesting as the old backend was p2p, but it sounds like hangouts are a more
standard client/server. Maybe Google needed more voice data to mine. Actually
better yet, facial expression data to mine. After all, Glass could live and
die by its ability to correctly identify faces.

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timdorr
Why would Google want to mine private video streams when they already have a
whole library of static content in the form of YouTube? Besides just the
privacy concerns, it would be easier to work with content that's sitting on a
disk somewhere, rather than trying to operate on data in-flight.

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zheng
Glass needs to operate on data in-flight, what better way to train it?
However, you do have a point wrt to Youtube. I think I left my <cynicism> tag
out of the previous post.

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peterb
I don't know why you are getting down-voted. It is in Google's interest to
have a large training corpus of faces for many machine learning algorithms
(face recognition, expression recognition, age detection, etc.).

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k3n
> Google+ account not required

I think this is misleading on Google's part...

From outward appearances, everyone that has a Google account (aka. GMail) has
a G+ account, and the only thing that changes when you "sign up" (or otherwise
activate) is that you can log in to it yourself.

I was on G+ for awhile, but I've now since disabled it in my control panel,
and yet people still share crap with me (as I'm still in their "circles") --
it just goes to my email. I think the service is always-on, they just don't
let you into the UI if it's not "active".

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RobAtticus
I can share things with non-Gmail people too on G+. There is an option to
share by email with people not using G+ yet. So it's not always-on, they just
allow sharing via email.

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eblume
It's important to note that those 'share by email' things are something the
sharer specifically checked - it's not checked by default. If the shares are
unwanted, I would complain to the person sharing them (although one imagines
the email must include an opt-out link.)

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rodh257
Disappointing that this doesn't include screen sharing. Our team have been
using Google Hangouts for remote code reviews as it seems to be one of the
better free options for screen sharing at a 30" monitor resolution
(MeetingBurner is probably slightly better though). I'd much rather just use
our Google apps gmail interface, rather than having to create a second Google+
account.

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cheald
I use join.me for conducting remote code interviews; there's no Linux client
(unfortunately), but for Windows/OS X, it's very nice and extremely readable.

~~~
NeilRShah
Check out screenleap. I've been using it for a week now and love it.

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itsnotlupus
The truly radical change in Hangout is of course the recent addition of an
alert sound being played when Hangout warns you they're about to kill your
chat for no particular reason.

Long lived hangouts rarely get to stay on screen, so the silent "are you still
there" message shortly followed by a disconnect was painful.

I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video calls
open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn much.

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tonfa
> I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video
> calls open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn
> much.

Maybe because it's not p2p?

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austenallred
Perhaps this is evidence of Google realizing that they're putting too many
good products inside of a product that nobody wants to use? Perhaps Google has
regained its sanity?

Haha, just kidding. They're just going to use this to try and get more people
on Google+

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masek
Would greatly improve the service...

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drivebyacct2
I hope this is the first in a long line of reducing redundancy across Google's
messaging platforms. Google+ posts, Google Talk, Google Hangouts, Google+
Messenger, Google Voice. Ahh! I wonder if iMessage's simplicity is motivating
it?

I love the power of Google Voice but it doesn't get much love and iMessage is
damn simple and pretty.

