My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings".
This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition.
I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)
> My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings".
from the blog post:
It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
Am I the only one who still uses hangouts? For some reason its the app my wife and I use, i dont use it with anyone else. It's handy that it pops up in chrome, and my Google Fi messages pop up in it too.
I still use it. Partly it's habitual since "GChat" was a big reason I got my first Gmail account many years ago. At the time, most IM platforms required you to install a separate application, but since it ran in the browser, I could keep a Gmail tab open at work or at on university PCs and keep in touch with Gmail contacts (as well as AIM contacts which was still a decent number of people back then).
I still use it because it's available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well as both Android and iOS devices. My friends and family are on a variety of platforms but we can all use Hangouts. I still dislike some of the changes they've made as it moved from the old Google Talk to Hangouts but being able to follow conversations on mobile and in my browser is great.
I have a few friends who use iPhones and occasionally complain because they want to use iMessage, but a good 30-40% of us can't run it since we don't own iPhones or Apple computers.
I have a handful of friends who I chat with daily via Hangouts. Text only, though (though I did once do a video call with one while I was strolling through Disneyland, back when we could still stroll through Disneyland).
It's a great solution, and it'll be a shame if Google ever really gets rid of it.
That strikes me as a nitpick. They gave away the code for what was previously a fully managed service. A smooth install process wasn't originally a goal. No sense biting the hand that feeds.
If the world had wanted Wave, it would have lived on, rather than Apache eventually retiring it.
I guess you werent there, attempting to install the service that was shut down abruptly with barely/no documentation and no way to use it with anyone else?
Ok, so they could have done a better job transitioning it to an Open Source project. I maintain that Google deserves credit for releasing and Freeing/Open Sourcing the source code.
If the interest were there, the new maintainers could have handled repackaging and documenting.
The post says “beginning next week”; not only has there not been a full roll-out yet, the phased roll-out hasn't started. The HN headline is misleading and inserts and “is now” that is not in the source (which instead just has an em-dash)
This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition.
I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)