The archiving capabilities will be welcome among business users and consumers alike. It kills the somewhat pointless Google+ Messenger and builds successfully on the best of Google Talk while adding features that others had long ago added to their more platform-specific products. On the whole, Hangouts is a badly-needed update to Google's chat infrastructure. It will also be a relief to Microsoft's team, which just added integration between Microsoft's Web e-mail client and Google Talk. That news will come as relief to users of multi-service IM clients such as Adium, Pidgin, and Web-based and mobile tools like Imo and Xumi. That means that Web and client-side chat applications that have used XMPP to connect to Google Talk will still be able to see presence information about their contacts in Google+ and chat with them via text in Hangouts. The good news is that Hangouts will still support client-to-server connections via XMPP, though only for one-to-one text chat. But it doesn't mean that Google has euthanized XMPP completely, as some have reported. That means that users of Jabber, OpenFire, and other open-source XMPP-based instant messaging servers won’t be able to tie into Hangouts through their own systems and will have to have separate Google credentials to chat with Google users. As it turns out there's good news and bad news.ĭuring a "fireside chat" with the Google + Platform team today, Vice President of Engineering Chee Chew cleared the air over questions about how the consolidation of Google's chat applications under Hangouts would affect users of third-party chat tools like Pidgin and Adium. Chew also addressed the matter of businesses which used the Extended Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to connect their private IM systems to Google Talk users in the past. Nothing was said at the time about what the changes would mean for developers and users of software that had previously connected to Google Talk. The extent of that openness wasn't exactly clear from Google's presentation of Hangouts during yesterday's marathon Google I/O keynote presentation. And while it doesn't yet span all the real-time communications options-SMS support is reportedly in the works, while support for Google Voice has not been discussed-Hangouts poses a significant challenge both to Apple's iMessage and Microsoft's Skype because of its cross-platform support and relative openness. Hangouts isn’t just an app-it's an entire real-time communications architecture overhaul with deep hooks into Gmail and Google Drive. Previously known internally to Google by the codename "Babel," Hangouts consolidates the previously disconnected Google+ video Hangouts, the Google+ Messenger chat application, and the Gmail-connected Google Talk platform into a single app and architecture. SAN FRANCISCO, CA-Yesterday Google released Hangouts, the company's new video, voice, and text chat application.
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