Google Hangouts

» see hangouts.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the chat bar showed up in the corner of my gmail window sometime around 2007, back when it was called google talk. i was on msn for real conversations, that never changed, but gtalk was there for the people whose only account was a gmail address. it was quiet and it was already open, because gmail was already open. hangouts was what google renamed that thing in 2013 when it decided the chat bar should be an app.

google announced hangouts at its i/o conference in may 2013, and the pitch was consolidation. at the time google was running google talk on one side and a video product called google+ hangouts on the other, and the plan was to melt them into one. for a couple of years it more or less held. you could type to someone or start a video call from the same window, and the video part was genuinely good, better than skype on a bad turkish connection some nights.

the trouble was that google could never leave its own messengers alone. hangouts arrived to unify everything, then google shipped allo and duo alongside it, then it started pulling features back out into google chat and google meet. by the time i noticed hangouts was gone, i had already been moved somewhere else without deciding to move. that is how most google chat apps end, not with a shutdown you attend but with a redirect you find one day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

underneath the branding hangouts was google talk with a video engine bolted on and a friendlier skin. it logged into your google account and lived in gmail, and it synced your conversations across every screen you owned. for people who did not want to think about which messenger to install, that was enough. it was the default, and being the default was its whole strategy.

~ the postmortem ~

the end came in slow motion. google split video off into meet and chat off into google chat, then spent two years telling consumers the switch was coming. in november 2022 hangouts on the web started redirecting to chat, and anyone who wanted their old messages had until the first day of 2023 to download them before they were deleted. the app that was built to end google's messaging confusion became one more thing google had ended.

~ what remains ~

google chat inherited the users and almost none of the warmth. the thing people actually miss is smaller than the product: a chat window that was simply always there in the corner of the mail you were already reading, no app to open, no login to think about. hangouts was the last time google made messaging feel that casual. everything after it has been an app you have to go to on purpose.

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