What's unusable about Hangouts? I think it's a better experience on both mobile and web. And Adium still works just fine with it for person-to-person IM.
It loses messages all the time. It also sometimes pastes fragments of old messages in the middle of the conversatation
Two things GTalk never got wrong which are pretty crucial for messaging service.
The UI.. it was a total mess when they introduced it (lack of statutes, difficult to see who is available etc.) but those I have to admit improved recently.
For me it's the fact that my android phone notifies me about a new chat 5-10 minutes after I finished(!) the conversation on my desktop (gmail, webclient).
It's really annoying. My phone beeps, I think: "Oh a new chat", look at the phone, "oh, it's just that thing from 10 minutes ago".
I get that the phone can't check for new messages all the time because battery and stuff but wouldn't it be possible to have timestamps for first/last message in a converstation or something so the phone could detect that if the conversation was going on for some time already on different device then it shouldn't notify about it?
I mean it doesn't sound like rocket science, are there any deep architecture problems with that ?
