I was also an early adopter of Google Voice, which is now heavily integrated with Hangouts, and the recent merger of the two services has made it even worse. When Hangouts is signed in on my desktop and I receive a phone call on my GV number it will often only ring on my desktop and not on my phone, and there is no way to turn this feature off.

Additionally, some of my friends have poor internet service and Hangouts handles that about as well as a toddler falling down an up escalator. Messages are frequently significantly delayed or dropped altogether, we often find ourselves asking each other what messages we have and have not received because our chat windows frequently do not match up.

There are few things more infuriating than having a messaging service tell me it has delivered a message when it actually silently failed to send it.

If I don't have some way of knowing whether someone is actively at their keyboard, or has their phone/tablet screen on, and is likely to see my message and respond instantly, then my only recourse is to stare blankly at my display and hope that they show up. This is a huge fucking waste of time. Right now the "green chat bubble" means that the person (is at their computer || owns a smartphone).

Blindingly useless.

The critical thing to consider with hangouts is this: it is not Talk/your regular "synchronous" IM system. It is an async system, an extension of SMS (in terms of use case). As such "staring into the screen" is not using the system correctly, since it's a fire-and-forget system that will push-ping you back when the other side replies. Once I acknowledged that, I basically signed out of Hangouts-via-Talk on my computers and happily use it almost solely on mobile, with conversations synced across all devices (the conversation holes themselves in a XMPP client provide for quite an uncanny experience, which is also why I like the SMS/Hangouts split conversations instead of transparent fallback that becomes obvious once you swap devices).

Since it's a significantly different product, I don't know if they had better completely split Hangouts or outright kill Talk, because as such they used network effects to convert people from Talk+Messages Plus+Android Messenger (or whatever it was called) into the unified Hangouts. What I wish though is that they provided extensions to XMPP allowing existing XMPP clients to implement reasonable feature parity for text chats (I could care less for video+audio in my XMPP client of choice, especially given the increase in dependencies and code complexity), so that the experience would be more seamless and more async overall instead of the XMPP-is-sync/hangouts-is-async beast we have to handle, without having a browser plugin overflow into my native OS.

That just taught me to use Hangouts for conversations where I don't need (but might welcome) a realtime reply. Hangouts are in a nebulous zone between chat and email for me.

For me, if I absolutely need an instant reply, I really need to call the person. (Even presence indicators aren't a promise that someone will prioritize your IM and reply. There's no indicator for "desperately wants to surrender absolute attention to you no matter how insignificant your topic.")

With Hangouts, they stay "open" in the background, so I can have an idle conversation with new notes every few days, it doesn't bother me. I can have a hangout with multiple people when some are online and others can catch up with the conversation later. And it's less formal / less work than email.

This all comes down to use case. I'd probably grant that Hangouts is a terrible new ICQ. But I've found it to be a great improvement over email for close friends.

presence is one feature that i liked a lot in google talk and i am baffled this was removed in hangouts. anyone know why?

And that perhaps by lying to users and telling them that all their friends are "online" even when they clearly aren't, people will be more likely to chat with them and "grow" the service. Nevermind that you need another person to actually be there before you can have a conversation.

There must have been at least a fraction of the hangouts development team that thought this was a boneheaded idea. And the millions of complaints that they got when they released? Those didn't stop because the experience got better, they stopped because it was clear that nothing was going to change. This screams "management decision" to me.

(a) In the web version, there seems to be no way to curate your "friend list." Despite choosing "Never show," people I've once interacted with via a Craigslist ad keep showing up. Deleting contacts is a pain.

(b) iPhone client lets you enable images in messages. Great! Unfortunately, they don't show up on the web client.

(c) On the iPhone client, past conversations keep popping up even after I "archive" them. They disappear for a bit, and then appear again a few days later.

(d) The GV app doesn't let you make calls inside the app (it insists on calling another number of yours). The GV webpage doesn't either. And yet, the Gmail interface lets you place calls and I use this all the time. So confusing.

Now it opens a fresh Hangouts window and takes at least 15 seconds to actually answer/place a call. Horrendous.

I ported my Google Voice number out to my cell phone which is a huge pain but it did work eventually.

When I was a kid and spent a lot of time planted in front of my computer IM'ing with friends locally and around the world, I loved messaging! There were a few great general IM apps that would allow me to connect to multiple services all under a unified interface. Some friends on MSN? Some friends on AIM? Not a problem, just add those accounts to my preferences. I could see when people were online, the messaging seemed reliable and consistent (for the most part), I was able to see when/if things were delivered, I could see when people were typing a message to me.

15 years later and I feel like people have shifted a lot of their lives to mobile but the solutions we have to work with to communicate are half of what they used to be. Are my friends online? Who knows. Can I see any kind of status if they're an iPhone user? Definitely not. Did the message I just sent actually get delivered? I hope so! Oh, let me launch Skype for two minutes so I can send a message to one of the two friends I have on that platform.

I don't see why this should be tied to the mobile OS platform. That just makes no sense at all. Should I only be able to communicate with people who use the same type of mobile OS as me? What sort of pre-internet madness is this?

Right now, at least for Android, I find facebook (yes, facebook!) to have the best mobile IM client. Light, clean, to the point with some nice UI details and options.

And it also has all my contacts. And it is cross platform. And accessible from the web. And standards-based (I can still XMPP in to facebook IM and do everything the web-based client lets me do).

Yes. Despite facebook being creepy, it's still miles better than super-creepy Google. After all, it's just one website and unlike Google you know when you interact with it.

iMessage always works very well for me and I love that it's integrated with SMS so cleanly. It also provides read receipts so I know if a message has been received.

I don't use WhatsApp but a competitor of its called Viber which also does calls and it works well and includes delivered and seen receipts. It also tells me if the user is online which is very useful.

Facebook messenger also works great imo and is one of my most used communication methods.

10 years ago I was also using IM a lot. I'd come home from school every day and use it until I went to bed. MSN was the Facebook of the day. Fortunately everyone I knew used MSN (it was ubiquitous with IM here). I used Adium on Linux and thought it was a nice client but I think today we're in a much better position than before. Fragmentation seems to be much worse today but handling that is as simple as installing an app for the service a specific friend uses. The fact we have push notifications means I don't need to check in with 10 apps to see if I got a message - I'm alerted when a message is received and who it's from and in what app I can view it. It would be nice to use one app but I don't think the fragmentation is too big of a user experience problem.

Personally I wish everyone would just use SMS! Most plans for smartphones come with unlimited SMS nowadays. I hate having to send my communications through so many companies with questionable privacy practices. The only place SMS is problematic is when messaging abroad but I doubt that's a major concern for most people (and they can use one of the plethora of other methods for messaging abroad anyway).

Or when you don't want to give people your phone number.

When you don't have a phone number (data only cellular or WiFi only tablet).

When you don't want your messaging ID tied to a number owned by a phone company that you can't control and instead want it tied to your own domain name / email.

When you want to be able to send as different IDs (personal, work, consulting).

When you want some way to send pictures, formatted text, transfer files.

When you want to send/receive messages on your desktop, or tablet as well. Either switching between devices or using multiple devices at the same time.

When you want to send/receive more than a few characters in one message.

When you want to integrate into another service, e.g. an IRC bridge, because it's not just data there's no open API to link to. And even if your plan has unlimited SMS the days when you could email -> sms freely are pretty much gone.

(And if you don't have unlimited SMS).

SMS is terrible, the worst possible implementation of sending text between people. The only good point to it is that every phone can do it - and that doesn't even apply now in the days of iPod touches and smaller tablets that are basically smartphones /without the phone/.

For those who want to SMS from their desktop or tablet, http://mightytext.net/ solves the following problem:

|When you want to send/receive messages on your desktop, or tablet as well.

Ahh, but that's the reason Whatsapp took off outside the USA. An SMS costs me 29c per message, it's a big profit center for some mobile companies. But if I use Whatsapp, I get free texting from iPhone to Android (and other platforms) and my total monthly phone spend is just $5, because I only pay for data. Some of my friends are on $30 - $50/month plans... so Whatsapp (and/or Facebook Messenger) save me $300 - $540 per year by not making me switch to those plans.

Also consider that in Europe, "international" can sometimes be just a 30 minute train ride away. If you have many friends in other countries you might want free international SMS more than if your friends were all only in the same country.

Unlimited call/messaging subscription plans do exist, but you have to use a lot of voice and SMS for them to be worth it. My typical monthly bill is ~$10-20 (almost all of that data), and some months, e.g. when on vacation and using a foreign SIM while not using my Danish one, I pay nothing. So it wouldn't make sense to pay an up front fee on the order of $50/mo to get "free" SMS.

Then trying to send a block of text will spam your friends depending on phone and service which formats it into multiple txts.

these pain points are why I only use sms for very logistical messages to family/friends and move to online platforms to share materials and communicate more effectively.

It's basically over for XMPP, but Hangouts was a still born PoS.

Nothing is over for XMPP until a better open alternative comes out. If Google see their Hangouts as a way forward, let them open the protocol and pull it through IETF to make it a standard. Oh, they are too selfish to do it? So they can get lost then, it's not an XMPP replacement.

No one else is eager to do anything like that as well, so XMPP remains the only candidate at present.

* I feel like the concept of "being online" is a bit redundant. For iMessages/Hangouts when it works, messages are sent to mobile devices, which may be "available" even when the recipient isn't online and "on" the service at the moment. Also, Google Hangouts chat still supports Jabber, and does support online statuses :)

* iMessages shows delivery receipts, and opt-in read receipts. Not certain about the Hangouts app (on iOS), but it looks like there are three pulsating dots as the message is "sending" and the timestamp appears when the message is "sent".

* A good chat client goes a long way. My needs are probably different than yours, but using Messages on OS X works great for me. Integrates with iMessages, Google Hangouts chat, and FB chat. All I need!

Has this changed? When iMessage came out, read receipts were opt-out.

So I convinced dad to try it with me. He wanted to send me a pic. Right away Hangouts on his phone said something about how sending pics required G+, but maybe he could skip that step, or not, we couldn't figure wtf was going on.

So now we're all on WhatsApp (and I love it). It just worked right away.

I can see in my crystal ball that Google's downfall will be:

- attempting to passive-aggressive force everybody into their G+ world.

- making every Google service so dependent on other services (namely G+) that every simple task will be interrupted by some sort of "Would you like to join G+.."

edit: formatting.

The thing is, because of the "your Google+ account is your identity" perspective, it seems obvious from the point of view of Google's developers that all their social services should depend on it. But from everyone else's perspective, they don't want to sign up for a new social network.

I emailed everyone in my Whatsapp contact list, asked them to switch. It only took 48 hours. Already uninstalled Whatsapp from my phone.

They also have an open API and documented protocol.

I was a WhatsApp subscriber, and I'd pay for Telegram.

For all its warts (which don't end up bothering me much), the fact that Hangouts' messages are available on my/any desktop, where I can communicate with a full keyboard, is a necessity for me. It's the chief reason why I've dismissed WhatsApp as a replacement.

(and since I don't use an iOS device or Mac, iMessage isn't an option either.)

If you want to make a webapp, fine, make a webapp and leave it in my browser like every other webapp. If you want to make a native client, make a native client. Don't do this half-assed crap that does nothing well.

But still the fact that I can use it on the desktop and the android client is pretty ok, makes me use it.

My parents-in-law still can't figure out how to get on their G+ account to use Hangouts, but for them Skype is second-nature. Open it, click on the contact, phone rings, presto, we're chatting.

Search? More adverts, non-PC results lowered in priority, 'piracy' results lowered, etc.

Gmail? Luckily hasn't changed much so it's still pretty great, but the stuff they have changed is bad: eg, advert tabs.

Google Reader? Dead.

Google Talk? Dead, replaced with terrible Hangouts.

Google+. Don't need to comment here.

Android? Less and less open with more functionality moving into 'cloud services' to try and lock out competition/forking.

Google Glass? Nice idea but not practical because the implementation is still bad.

I'm sure there are more mistakes I'm forgetting. Anybody know of anything Google has actually done right in the last 5 years? Maybe Google Fibre if you're part of the 0.0000001% of the world who can get it.

Search - knowledge graph and answer cards

Android - Google Now and voice interface

Hangouts - the original product, for video chats

I worked briefly with Knowledge Graph while consulting at Google last year, and in future forms I think KG is going to eat the world - great technology.

I also like Google Now and expect it to keep getting better.

- Daily weather updates

- It's picked up the stocks I have from my google searches and shows me them

- The time to get home from work is great if you've got google traffic monitoring, it can let you know where a crash is and suggest another route

Many things have changed: - Drive integration broke attachments, downloads, etc. - Editing is broken. Sometimes the cursor jumps for no reason. - etc.

Could you elaborate? I haven't had any trouble with attachments or downloads at all and I haven't actually heard people complain about this before.

> Editing is broken. Sometimes the cursor jumps for no reason.

Though combined with this, I'm guessing you have something funky with Javascript on your browsers? Running NoScript, maybe?

What do you mean?

- No ability to delete more than one conversation at once.

- Hangouts receives SMS even without permission.

These are all the mistakes Google consciously built into the app. I'm amazed it has as high of a rating as it does already. Then again, one needs a Google+ account to rate anything on the Play Store, so the ratings are far from unbiased and certainly not representative.

Don't know of a way to do this on desktop.

Edit: By individually I mean grouped. SMS bulk deleting works, as does hangouts, but you cannot mix them.

The simplicity of Talk was a huge feature. I still have not upgraded to Hangouts on my tablet. Frankly, I just don't understand what the hell G+ really is. It has so many features, so many facets, it's like a giant ball of wool that I don't know how to unravel. But it's not so much that I can't unravel it (I know I could if I spent the effort) - but I know I can't expect others to do that. Telling someone to join G+ implies so much possibly more than just a chat service, which is what we actually want. Even if they are already members, I might end up seeing who all their friends and relationships are, their photos, god knows what else. I don't want any of that. Telling them to use Hangouts and not join G+ is another giant ball of weirdness. It's too much, it's too complex.

So I've gone from recommending everyone use GTalk to trying to find something simpler that just works and just does the single thing I want. ie., exactly what Talk used to be.

Wait, what? WhatsApp's "last seen" feature is hardly an indication of who's online, and Hangouts allows for group chats...

Are we sure that the backend behind Hangouts is much different from Talk? I suspect not, but there must be something causing all of the complaints of slow/poor delivery. Bad HCI/UX?

There's also the privacy issues. Google keeps refusing to provide proper privacy for communications that are really supposed to be private, and should be none of their damn business, data mining or not.

I've said it before, as soon as there are privacy-friendly alternatives to Google's app that look good and not like they were designed in 1999 user-hostile, I'll move away from their services. I'm already planning on recommending everyone I know to use TextSecure/Whisper, and I'll do the same as soon as a good DarkMail-based (ugh, yes I cringe at the name, too) client is available (and if the protocol doesn't turn out to be snake oil, of course).

Google should learn from what happened to MtGox, or I could even push the analogy with the recent mass protests/revolutions - if you keep people frustrated long enough and aren't answering to their concerns, they are going to dump you like there's no tomorrow, in a mass-exodus once there's a really good alternative or your latest blunder is so big they can't take it anymore.

Also, whether it's Google+ or Hangouts, Google has gained a bad habit of thinking that if they "own" a platform, they can push whatever crap they want at the users, and force them into using it - and they'll gain market share in that market like magic!

Wrong. What they'll get is at best very little engagement with their app or service, and a lot of pissed off users in the process, that weren't pissed off with Google's other services before, but now are.

Unfortunately, most of Google's products are taking the hangouts route: bloated, messy UI, no clear conceptual model and shiny over functional.

I don't get it, but I wont put up with it either. I've migrated most my data and services from Google to other places.

A lot of people talk about EU using WhatsApp, but it's a huge hit in Asia too. My mom is on it, so are her colleagues (we're talking 50+ year olds here) which is very different from FB or twitter adoption. WhatsApp made it simple enough for a very broad audience-range to use

For now FB messenger is reasonably useful messaging service. It's not perfect and I hate HATE their new update (with the round floating avatars) but it's still marginally less annoying than G+

Seems to me it was more of a bid to force people onto Google Plus. It's a shame, Google has been chasing Facebook for social and gaining no traction (Buzz, Wave, Plus) and in the process gave up the chance to own messaging. It may as well be 2004 for all messaging has evolved over the last decade.

you should google "inductive fallacy".

i've heard exactly the same "arguments" against twitter and whatsapp from people who either echo views of other people or just haven't made an effort to use the product.

when you start engaging on these platforms you realize they are thriving - maybe not exactly the way you thought they would coming from the fb land.

I intentionally said "anecdotally" because I knew full well it was inadmissable as a representative of the whole. But the point remains that nobody else in my life uses it as a social media platform at nearly the same scale they use Facebook, and when it comes to social media that's the only thing that matters to me.

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well."

That simply adage pretty much sums up why Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram are successful and the Google Hangouts, Plus, etc. are failures.

But I don't really get why people in the US (I get outside the US) are using these apps vs. just SMS - sure, some additional functionality but everyone has SMS. So why would I use Whatsapp or Telegram where I have to get people I know to use it?