![google hangouts chat google hangouts chat](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u6cVDwGrslE/X4ijllFJA-I/AAAAAAACBlA/7XfDyssjeMETmk_XLgEUW8hVfsz4v_hFgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/Hangouts%2BGoogle%2BChat.png)
The team chat concept wasn’t new to Google. And they want a “Zoom-like” experience for video.įinally, the world knew exactly what it wanted, and Google was in a position to give it to them. They want a team chat workflow for chat, whether it’s for business or personal communications. This gave us enormous insight into the world’s chat and video preferences. When the pandemic hit, almost all “in-person” communications were replaced by chat and video. While the past is rife with rapid development and experimentation for Google communications, today the dust has settled with Google Meet and Google Chat. Regardless, everything was about to change as the pandemic hit, ushering in the modern era of communications. Facetime, while popular, was iPhone-only at the time. On the video side, Duo was popular with some folks, due to its ability to host video calls between Android and iPhones. Google users continued to use Google Hangouts for chat and WhatsApp users stayed with WhatsApp. Google’s answer was Allo (for chat) and Duo (for video).Īllo and Duo were both released in 2016 and both could be used with your cell phone number, rather than using your Google account.Īllo had some interesting and innovative features, but it never seemed to catch on.
![google hangouts chat google hangouts chat](https://fcbrossard.net/assets/google-hangouts-vs-hangouts-chat-featured.png)
They also noticed the popularity of Facetime on the iPhone.Įveryone was using their phones to chat and do video, and they weren’t using Google services to do so. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 Billion in 2014, Google certainly took notice. It’s hard to explain how WhatsApp just suddenly appeared out of nowhere to become one of the biggest communication tools on the planet. In 2019 Google+ shut down and Google Hangouts officially was replaced by Google Chat and Google Meet. But it certainly opened up a lot of minds to the idea that email shouldn’t be everything. Google Wave relied more on message threads than channels, and it didn’t quite nail everything we wanted from team chat. Even back then, Google recognized that email isn’t the best thing for daily back and forth team chat. Google Wave was one of the first products positioned as a replacement for email. Quick side note: Google Wave (mentioned above), although it did not last, it is seen by some as the godfather of modern team chat. If you had someone on your buddy list, you had access to them in a way we never before imagined. If you were online in the 90s you almost certainly had an AOL email address and used AOL Instant Messenger. The first big explosion of personal communications on the internet was arguably AOL. To see how we got here, we need to go all the way back to the beginning of the internet, in the 1990s. If you are chatting or doing video on Google, at this point you have been rolled into Google Chat and Google Meet. Google Talk, Google Hangouts, Google+, and all of the other iterations are now part of Google history. Today, we use Google Chat for messaging and we use Google Meet for video, regardless of whether we are a business or personal account. The good news is things are currently very simple. While all of this experimentation has helped the development of our current products, it has left a list of no longer used Google chat products and product names. Almost every Google foray into chat has resulted in learning experiences or technology developments that we can still see in our current lineup of chat tools. As a result, there are a few Google chat offerings over the years that are no longer with us. In many ways, the history of Google’s chat offerings is a history of internet chat trends.īefore starting this journey, you need to keep in mind that Google is known for experimentation and taking risks. Google has had some sort of chat offering since at least 2005. In this post, we’ll introduce exactly how Google Chat got here and the different personas it's become over the last few years.
![google hangouts chat google hangouts chat](https://9to5google.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/02/hangouts-chat-cover.jpg)
Now in its most innovative form yet, Google Chat hosts is recognized as a genuine competitor to the likes of Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Zoom. Folks familiar with Google Chat will have lived through various iterations of the popular chat app.įrom Google Talk, being part of Hangouts, and now its own standalone app (but part of Workspace), Google’s messaging offering has changed shape over the past decade or so.