Googe Plans to Merge Hangouts, Talk & Messenger
A major selling point of Google+ was the hangout feature, allowing users to talk to your contacts in a group chat environment. Gigaom reported today that Google are planning to revamp their chat facilities by merging hangouts with talk and messenger to provide a unified chat facility.
The news emerged from a Google+ Hangouts session at Google I/O yesterday and would see a unified chat service that would allow you to conduct both one-to-one sessions and group sessions.
Google Product Manager Nikhyl Singhai was asked at the session why the company had so many different chat and messaging services. He confessed that Google had not really served the customer well in this area, saying “We have done an incredibly poor job servicing our users here.”
He went on to say that whilst there is nothing official to announce yet, they are working on unifying the facilities they currently offer.
Singhai revealed the extent that Hangouts are used internally, with all meetings conducted via video conferencing. “We do over 10,000 hangouts every day at Google,” he said.
As for other future features however Singhai was not so specific, but he did say that Google were aiming to make Hangouts available on all supported devices, raising the prospect of using Hangouts via your mobile.
Do you use Hangouts at the moment?
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