Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat?
Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features?
I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.
Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams.
So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could never be an awesome focused product if it had to be all things to all people.
So the competitor to Facetime/WhatsApp/FB Messenger is Google Duo. It's originally phone-based and designed primarily for 1-1, though it supports small groups.
The competitor to Zoom and Teams is Google Meet. It's enterprise-based for huge meetings.
The competitor to Slack is Google Chat.
And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors, and still has moderate consumer usage so they can't kill it, though I'm sure they're doing their best to figure out how to get people to migrate eventually without losing them to a competitor in the process.
So despite all the flak Google gets for a fragmented messaging ecosystem, it's driven by extremely valid market reasons.
And Google isn't a video communications platform, it's a company. With several platforms, serving several totally distinct markets.
And they brand everything as a "tool for everyone" so no one can tell if they are the intended demographic until after they install the app or do an hour of research.
I would love to see how a branding team continues to justify this "Google $generic_word" branding model to the brass at Alphabet. People were unlikely to make "Hangout" a verb like "Zoom", and they definitely won't do that with "Meet". The only thing this seems to accomplish is reinforce Google's reputation for rushing things to market and pulling support too early.
I really think these rushed entries by tech giants only benefit the Zooms and Slacks in the specific space. When potential customers are bogged down by choosing between Teams, Discord, Telegram, Messenger, or whatever other chat app is out there, they are more inclined to choose the familiar incumbent.
Exactly, I can already create a Hangouts video call and share a link to invite others into the call. Doesn't make sense to create an entirely new service for this use case when Hangouts was designed for it (plus the new service will have a 60 minute limitation for free accounts). I agree with what GP said about Hangouts being a zombie product, but while there may be some valid market reasons for the product fragmentation, that fragmentation is also probably hurting them more than it's helping.
It's Slack + low-latency voice chat. With vastly less hassle than Teamspeak/Mumble/etc. Recipe for success right there, though I'm not sure how well their monetization has gone.
I haven't heard this term before, but I'm not sure it is a "rob and duplicate" if they are targeting a market segment that Slack never advertised towards nor was really designed for. Seems more like refreshing Slack for a niche, but it turns out to be a really big niche.
You would think Microsoft Teams would beat them, but they inflated it with Office 365 "Features". In comparison, Slack feels more like a complete product the first time you use it. Any other must-haves for your organization are treated as add-ons.
Funny ... none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space. Each of them is expanding its reach and capabilities, coming from a place of strength.
Google is just practicing "me-too"-ism and not really trying to solve a problem except some engineer is bored and some product person thinks these tools could become a threat to ad dollars if allowed to grow "unchecked".
Google owns YouTube (which you forgot to include YouTube Hangouts On Air). Google absolutely is a video comms company.
Microsoft keeps shooting own goals such as buying Skype, renaming the popular Lync product (not be confused with several other Microsoft products also named after corrupted versions of the work "link") to "Skype for Business" just to make everybody confused.
Then later "Microsoft Teams" comes out of nowhere. Maybe I live behind a rock but I see people using all kinds of chat programs, and all kinds of Microsoft software, but I've never known anybody who uses "Microsoft Teams" and I wonder if it is as popular as "Hipchat" but backed by a company which gives in more benign neglect than Atlassian can afford to.
One constant is that chat programs are constantly churning, another is that every chat program seems to get worse over time, the third is the level of functionality that chat programs have had since early 2000s. (I helped reskin Paltalk for Brazil and it seemed to do everything that Skype and Facebook Messenger did today) The fourth is that consumers and vendors seem to learn nothing from past successes and failures.
(e.g. AIM was great, but AOL failed. Chat clients are usually an attempt to lock you into using services from a particular company, so whether they "succeed" or "fail" has nothing to do with how they succeed or fail, but just a function of what state in the vendor lock-in cycle they are in.)
When I ask people what Instagram is for, they always describe it as Facebook, but without all the crap. Or as Facebook with posts sorted chronologically. Doesn't make me want to sign up with it, and end up with another Facebook.
For Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instragram they all started as distinct platforms and companies, so the question would be should they consolidate. IMO Facebook has made the right decision not to consolidate, as individuals bought into those platforms pre-acquisition and don't necessarily see themselves as part of a homogenous Facebook customer base.
> ...none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space.
So? Google wants to make more money than they do. What's wrong with that?
Also what's wrong with "me-too"-ism? Pepsi exists even though Coca-Cola is fine. Verizon exists even though AT&T works. What you call "me-too"-ism, I just call capitalism and healthy competition.
Google's strategy has nothing to do with ad dollars or anyone being "bored" and everything to do with making money in a different market.
You're basically arguing that Google shouldn't build more products to try to make more money? But that's not how public corporations work. Making money is their whole point.
Google is trying to kill off classic Hangouts, starting with G Suite and then later consumers. This was started in early 2019 [0] but late last year they shifted timelines.
>And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors
So Google has Hangouts that is able to compete broadly in the consumer and business market but it's not quite good enough so the best answer is to let Hangouts slowly die and invent 4 new apps?
You should switch to Allo for IM. Oh, but if you want to send an SMS find something else, Hangouts might work. But if it is for work stuff you should use Chat. Well unless it's also for video then you should use Meet. But if it's for personal video then try Duo. Ah, well, nvm we killed Allo. Well now Meet is free for everyone so use that for personal use also, I guess.
Totally makes sense. What a cohesive strategy they have enacted to respond to market trends.
Why would anyone in their right mind trust a Google chat, video, or conferencing app? They reinvent the wheel every 3 years and set fire to their user base every time.
Hangouts was absolutely fine. They just needed to add more features and business tiers. Instead of updating Hangouts they invented a convoluted mess that is destined to fail.
The real problem is that there are too many chat servers period.
From a back-end perspective there is a real difference between a platform where a teacher can lecture to 500 students, as opposed to one where people talk to each other over an ad-hoc WiFi network.
However, the story of messaging applications is that something new comes along, like CuSeeMe, people are blown away by it, that thing inevitably deteriorates over time technically (why?) and often deteriorates socially (I switched from Skype to a real SIP phone since ever since I went to Montreal I get these ladies calling me up who want to speak French and I think show me something I don't know what to see.)
It's not easy to see progress. Facebook messenger doesn't seem that different from AIM except one of them is tied to Facebook and the other is tied to AOL.
Many of these video chat programs use WebRTC and related standards, but messaging applications have resisted any kind of standardization. (XMPP is popular for cops, firefighters, and soldiers, but ordinary people see those angle brackets and you've lost them)
Most people don't understand the real differences between the platforms and the benefits they get from them, but they know that every time your company partners with a customer or vendor that uses Slack you end up logging into multiple instances of Slack. Often they make you a channel to talk about your project, but for them it is one of 50 channels they monitor on Slack that are about anything from cat photos to immediate crises, so you might not get any replies if you hop in a week later.
Some people I talk to want me to install WhatsApp, other people want me to install everyone else.
The rest of the world gets it: I don't need to buy an iPhone to call other iPhone users, I don't need to have a Verizon plan to call an AT&T customers.
The reason why chat clients don't improve is that they aren't really competing -- if you had a common protocol then chat clients could compete on being better at helping you with your workload. Instead they remain a mechanism for enforcing platform lockin. In the end that's what's likely to happen to Zoom if it runs into any financial turbulence -- company X will buy it because they think they can use it in some way to lock in customers.
If the EU wanted to do something to improve digitial ecosystems it would be making standardized messaging a thing, but it is hard to do that: you can't stop a few high school students from making a walled-garden chat systems, but you really have to stop billion dollar companies from doing it.
So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here.
1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible.
2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also totally different. Similarly whether chat persists in long-lived "rooms", or only for the length of a video call, or only between two people.
3) Finally, people making corporate buying decisions want a product that fits easily into their conceptual understandings. Slack created a category. Google had to respond with a product branded specifically for that category, not a mega-product that also does the things in that category, because people don't "get" that for whatever psychological reason.
You're right that Hangouts did all this previously. But that's also why Hangouts failed. It was a "jack of all trades, master of none."
1) Is it really? Slack already has chat, and 1-1 calls. I don't see a huge UX leap to expand 1-1 calls to big meetings.
2) So what? If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings. That's just UI at that point.
3) This makes sense and is probably the main reason hangouts failed. However, I wonder if they could have multiple sub-products under the hangouts umbrella but still keep it a unified piece of software.
> If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings.
Unfortunately not. A framework for large video meetings is necessarily routed through a central server which can add tremendous latency, even between two people near each other.
The architecture for 1-1 meetings tends to be peer-to-peer and focus on minimizing latency.
There are a lot of architecture tradeoffs between the different models. Choosing an optimal architecture for each product turns out to be quite necessary.
>Despite the fact that FB Messenger is explicitly designed for non-professional use and can do group chats people are still gravitating to Zoom.
Facebook doesn't seem to be secure.
I bet people don't want to have hours of recordings attached to their real name, so creating random account on something like Zoom seems like an great.
We use Meet at work. As far as I can tell, it's just Hangouts, but with a lot of stuff removed like the good chat integration that Hangouts previously had. I think they rebranded it B2B to try to kill it off to not compete with their new Duo and whatever else consumer offerings no one likes.
Bet they are kicking themselves now that Zoom ate their lunch in the pandemic. If they hadn't killed their consumer offering, they would have been well placed like Zoom was for a massive traffic boost. Bet whoever wrote Duo to replace Hangouts got a promo, though!
Hangouts used to be a single product that combined video, voice, direct, and group chats. It was quite good, especially with Google Voice layered in.
Google split that in to Meet (video/voice) and Chat (direct/group) in a half-hearted effort to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. You could also say they split it further via Google Voice, which became a standalone paid offering.
The issue is they still haven't solved for external chat in Hangouts Chat, which is a critical feature many rely on in legacy Hangouts, so that feature keeps the legacy version running I think.
They really botched the launch of Google Chat. The original deprecation timeline for legacy Hangouts was something like last June.
Meet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack.
Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime.
Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new.
I think the problem in this space is that expressed/accepted demand for Enterprise and Consumer offerings are very different, and the platform owners don't fundamentally respect the business. All platform companies saw these features as sideshows that drive engagement for something else. At work I talk about a "General Theory of Chat Clients Always Getting Worse" -- there is literally no messaging client on the market that is better than AOL/Yahoo/Google messenger of 20 years ago. That's because they aren't viewed as products.
Enterprises seem to be going for "collaboration" solutions that integrate video/audio with content like documents and chat. Think of a venn diagram of Slack/Files/Conferencing. Microsoft delivered Teams (aka Chat/SharePoint/1:1 or adhoc Calling/Group Conferencing, Google has Meet/Chat/Currents/Drive.
People just want to talk to people. Facetime and Facebook Messenger are great examples of that. But... even those platforms stick these functions in the ghetto of complementary products that a more like glue, they exist to keep you on the bigger platform. Google Duo is looking to be that kind of product.
The magic of Zoom is they made conferencing a standalone product got normal people to discover and adopt a vertically integrated, focused collaboration product that does one thing well. Zoom is really an iteration of Webex without Cisco bullshit, and is a demonstration of the beauty and magic of competition. My wife's circle of friends are now paid Zoom customers. That's unthinkable in other contexts... how many mom groups or PTOs were buying Webex? (And conversely, how many O365 enterprises skipped free SkypeForBusiness/Teams and buy Zoom!)
(Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on any of these products)
Hangouts was born out of Google+, and that merged with gchat. They rebooted it's UI a few times through all of this. Over the years they put more and more features onto it (like sms app integration, phone dialing, and many other things). If you used Hangouts as your sms app, you could txt from hangouts within Gmail. I think it became a franken-app that was just too hard to add to or improve anymore.
Duo / Allo: These were to be the consumer focused products. Allo obviously failed (I actually liked a lot about the UX of this app, I'm really sad it died). Duo seems to be a Facetime competitor. It focused on 1:1 video chats for a long time, with lots of fun little thing being added on (like the animation overlays), and leaving video messages. The UI is dead-simple, click a picture, get a video call. Tech wise there are a couple cool things. [1] it is end-to-end encrypted. [2] It is optimized for mobile. That means it adjusts very quickly to bandwidth and latency changes, which is great for cellular networks. Note that it has some group chat now, but only on mobile. (there is a desktop browser version, but that's still only 1:1). It also has integration with Google's phone app on android. EDIT: few other fun things: Duo and Allo can be used without a Google Account, only a phone # is needed. Allo had a web app so you could send/receive from your computer, this tech ended up being the foundation for the sms Messages app web client (both were available for a while and the UI and behavior was exactly the same [2.1]).
Chat: obviously a slack competitor. It has bot integration, threads, and probably some other things. As a daily user of this, I will say message delivery and notification are much better than what old hangouts used to provide (when you are on desktop and mobile a lot, notifications were sometimes not great. It seems better with Chat).
Meet: stand alone video. While it seems very similar to the old hangouts video product, I feel like it's been improving quickly and there are lots of smaller features that I enjoy. When a meeting gets to a certain size, it defaults to muting new people that join (this is minor, but proven to be nice). Desktop sharing on it works rather well (at least on chromebooks, I can share a tab, a window, or my whole desktop. Sharing just a tab is nice so I don't accidentally share my email with outside people for example). For enterprise, you can use Meet to do live streaming to really large crowds[3]. There will be a normal meeting for presenters, then everyone watching gets a youtube like video player, and this supports up to 100k people. It assume better bandwidth, so it doesn't degrade on low bandwidth as well (or so I read, but maybe it's better now). Meet has lots of other enterprise features[4], and has a focus on meeting rooms, hardware, UI and things that go with installing this product into rooms. They also have Jamboards, so you can do digital whiteboard that can be shared with everyone on a call.
All 4 of these products got to start somewhat fresh tech-wise, and you can see that they are able to move rather quickly now, which is something classic Hangouts just wasn't allowing teams to do. Was it the right call? /shrug. For GSuite, there is at least Chat+Hangouts interop, so there is a migration path between those products. And I believe it was announced long ago that Meet+Chat would replace Hangouts for consumer, just not clear if/when (talked about Jan 2019 [5]). They were meant to be consumer vs business focuses, which seems to allow PM/UX not to fight about which features and designs they should move towards. The old hangouts mobile app had TONS of buttons in the past, and it could get confusing for non-tech savvy people, and I think they wanted to avoid this.
Google Hangouts, Google Chat: Products that worked real well, had a lot of 3rd party integrations built for it and now deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services. Their incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Both were pretty "groundbreaking" apps when they came out. Hangouts managed to figure out and resolve a lot of issues of team chats and voice/video streaming issues over poor/unreliable connections. A lot of the novel UI and features they developed is now taken for granted.
Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Conference. Meanwhile Zoom is laser focused.
Google Duo: An attempt at Whatsapp with a whiff of FaceTime. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Trio. Meanwhile Whatsapp, FaceTime are laser focused.
> Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing".
No way. Google Meet is how basically all meetings within Google happen, and is widely used by large G Suite enterprise customers. Create a calendar entry at work and you get a corresponding Google Meet meeting by default. It has integration with stand-alone videoconferencing units too, so the list of meetings for the given unit shows up on that unit and one tap and you're in the right meeting for the current time.
What's up does chat / does duo? We use zoom at work despite being on Google - meet really doesn't always work across even Google account tyoes. Ie Gmail vs gsuite vs some admin left some setting off for an external users domain and they cannot join.
Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
> The only remaining question marks are around what happens with classic Hangouts, and what additional features is Chat going to get that make it more consumer-oriented before it replaces Hangouts in Gmail.
Google is killing off Hangouts slowly and surely. Over time it will start showing its age so bad, that people will move on.
I loved the Hangouts Dialer integration. Had to replace it with Voice.
I loved the Hangouts/Voice - GMail integration where I could send/receive texts from within GMail. Had to replace it with Voice.
Before I could do most tasks from within GMail. Now I HAVE to use atleast 3 different apps that don't talk to each other.
The competition on the other hand is going the opposite direction with great integrations in place.
> For one thing, you can't purchase Meet by itself -- it's an entitlement within G Suite
Have been using Meet ever since it came out.
Free/personal tier users could always join a Meet (not create one).
Before this announcement, Meet could only be hosted by a G Suite customer
> the Meet announcement this week explaining availability for "all users", you should see it as a side-effect of the business product's maturity, not as a consumer-first offering.
It's a knee jerk reaction to Zoom.
Everyone on this planet has a GMail account and if Google understood what customers want, Meet would have had Zoom for lunch.
Today, anyone who works remotely and is not tied into Teams, have heard of Zoom.
I also trust Google about as much as I’m capable of picking up the entire organization and throwing it; not at all. Any product Google releases has a half life of about a year at this point, betting even the tiniest bit of my business on them is a non starter.
I use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound, connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google Calendar is also a big plus.
One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up button are blended in and out on moving the mouse cursor during a call. I'd prefer to at least have the option to let the toggles stay onscreen as I tend to use the mute mic toggle a lot during a meeting. Also there is a moment of awkwardness every time a call ends because many participants look for the end call button.
It's a great thing that I can use my Smartphone as a mic during a meeting. Would be great if this could be expanded to my phones' cam as a webcam replacement.
The hiding mute button also really bugs me - given that it something you generally need to have quickly accessible during a meeting, it really should be always visible & on the same spot. BlueJeans has this right - the button is always acesible and not moving around.
As for keyboard shortcuts - unless they are global, they will not work well if they need window focus as that means you still need to find the browser window in which it is running with your cursor and might as well click a button.
On iPad it’s even more frustrating as the buttons only show up on tap and they go away really quickly so if people are joining it pushes the buttons up and you end up missing it. They really need to fix that.
At least they no longer block you from using the website if you’ve disabled camera access.
> One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up button are blended in and out on moving the mouse cursor during a call. I'd prefer to at least have the option to let the toggles stay onscreen as I tend to use the mute mic toggle a lot during a meeting.
Could not agree more. Also, the shortcuts to mute audio and video are multiple key combinations and differ across platforms (i.e. using the command button on MacOS and Ctrl on other OSes). Why can't they be a single key, like M to mute/unmute audio and C for the camera? Heck, maybe even use spacebar for mute/unmute since it's that key of a feature?
The only feature I wish I could have is org-wide call recording.
We are financial startup and since we need to record all calls by law - which means we need to keep our legacy PBX system that is constantly a headache.
Right, that's my point. Which makes me think this is really a sick joke by some disgruntled engineer.
Out of all of the 48 major keys each with 16 possible modifier key combinations, how on earth did they settle on the one keystroke within a thumbnail of closing the application.
I left Google and the Meet team a while ago. Would have been great to experience this 30x growth though! Being oncall these days would have been interesting.
I have used Meet a lot both personally and professionally this spring and I think it's great. Been waiting for this announcement!
Loyal user is a well-recognised term in marketing among other areas meaning someone who keeps using the product over a long period of time. It's not more complicated than that.
Yes, but "loyal user" is in the same box as "target audience" and all the other terms in the marketing vernacular. This is a language of people taking advantage of others, talking about their victims. It makes little sense to use such language voluntarily on yourself.
It's not oppressive, it's objectifying; it treats you as a resource to be exploited with little to no consideration to your well-being. No reason to voluntarily use it on yourself.
Well this is just the nature of operating a business at scale. Even little corner shops don't recognise customers on an individual basis.
> It treats you as a resource to be exploited with little to no consideration to your well-being
There are companies which I feel loyal to (Valve/Steam, for example) because they treat their customers well. I believe they deserve my money because they're a good company so I will give them the benefit of the doubt if they do something wrong.
Ultimately we want to reward good behaviour in the market, no?
You might be taking "loyalty" a bit too literal, but that question seems odd on a forum that's broadly aligned with a community that features the editor wars (emacs, vi!), operating system wars (BSD, Linux, macos!) and countless other ways of attaching one's identity to pieces of software.
Is this the same service I'll have been using if my company has Google Suite and we've been using meet.google.com to run meetings? Asking because I've had the opposite experience - we've used Zoom for a few meetings recently and get massively better quality than we did on Meet, and I'm not sure what could be going wrong there. Or is this a new premium Meet service that's higher quality than both Meet and Zoom?
Zoom also displays a much much wider angle which feels like it explains the quality difference - the Meet one is a tiny portion of my webcam blown up and horribly artifacted.
G Suite domain owner and manager here, huge fan. Using zoom and meet a lot these days. Zoom’s voice prioritization is very nice compared to Meet. And if the Brady Bunch view is coming, I welcome it.
My only other complaint is that my world (DoD health) blocks Most of G Suite.
It released a week or two ago, so if you've been using Zoom recently, you might not have noticed. It's under the overflow in the bottom right > change layout.
I'm on MacOS/Firefox and it started showing a grid view for me a couple of weeks ago. I just assumed they were just rolling it out to replicate Zoom, but maybe it could have been configured somewhere on the G Suite side too.
I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.
The tech is not interesting, the UX is less interesting than Zoom or webex. The first hangout version was far more exciting than Google Meet, Duo or Latest-Hangouts.
Like every other industry, Google lost its ability to push boundaries forward and act as a beacon for innovation. "Higher resolution" is definitively not innovation.
> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.
Then you are a fool because high quality audio and video is not just a "nice to have" in video conferencing. It makes the difference between a phone-like conversation where you can just talk, and "I.. sorry.. after you. Ok so I was g.. no go on - what were you going to say? Sorry can you repeat that I can't hear you?"
That said, Zoom has been much better quality than Hangouts when I tried it. Do Meet and Duo use the same tech or does Google really have three different video conferencing systems?
fwiw, I have found video quality on Meet to be by far the worst out of any video chat app I've ever used. My company pays for g suite but all the video in my google meetings range between 320x240 and flip phone video from 15 years ago, and I swear I'm not exaggerating. This can happen even with a 2 person meeting. I've never had this issue with Zoom.
Weird, I have the opposite experience. Meet for years was much worse video/screen share resolution/latency/quality than Zoom or Gotomeeting. In fact it was so bad originally that a bunch of our team members requested we keeping paying for gotomeeting even though we had meet for free in GSuite.
It's gotten a bit better to the point it's mostly tolerable now, so we might actually switch over. Still, I wonder how much the web client is holding it back.
with most people working from home using the crappy webcam and mic they a don't have cam capable of doing 1280x920 or the bandwidth and/or computer capable of streaming at that res.
While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform.
The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?".
It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts (for their work), so when testing this out, never encountered the issue.
I predict they'll change their stance in a few months when they see zoom still crushing them in user numbers, but by then it'll be too late - people will remember meet as that app which is "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"
> "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"
Speaking of that, my last experience with Google Meet in business setting was this: every other meeting someone from our team would disappear in the middle of a call and reappear a minute later. Reason? Google's bullshit random "you need to re-verify yourself and type in your password NOW NOW NOW!" prompt that logs you out until you comply. Since us developers only used our company GSuite accounts for Meet calls (all communication unfortunately went through Slack), the only time we'd get this prompt would be a few minutes into the call.
Can someone from the gaia team change the default cookie validity period down by 20 minutes (ie. from 30 days to 29 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes) to resolve this issue?
As silly as it sounds, it would probably resolve this issue perfectly. As I remember, I always got the login prompt at roughly the exact same time into the meeting, suggesting it's just set to expire after a certain amount of whole days.
Google internally is well aware of this, and in fact one internal tool most engineers use actually has an expiry a few hours short of 24h simply to prevent exactly this issue.
I'd suggest changing it by a 12 hour delta. Then you are likely to start encountering it at the beginning of your day instead of in the middle of anything.
> In some cases, though, many are just wondering how this service hardly anyone had heard of became so popular.
Yeah, the first time I've heard of Zoom was when it landed on HN frontpage for doing some shady stuff on MacOS. Fast forward few months, my wife is asking me if I heard of it, because she'll have to start using it... I was similarly blindsided by the sudden rise of TikTok. These new platforms feel like coming completely out of the blue these days... or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.
> or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.
It's that.
People make fun of me when tell them I like to talk to teens about technology. Why, they ask. Why? Because I learn about all these new upcoming platforms. I ask them "how do you get music now", "how do you share photos", "what do you use instead of Facebook".
And I learn about Snap, TikTok, Instagram, etc. long before they are popular.
These platforms all thrive on word of mouth. Teens still hang out mostly in person in school, so they have rapid word of mouth.
Talk to teens about technology. It will be enlightening.
Remember the creepy VPN stuff marketed at teens that Facebook was doing? They really wanted to see what platforms teens were connecting to and engaging with!
Zoom has been popular for corporate meetings for a while now and I've seen multiple companies use it pre-covid. So when you had to find a video conferencing solution ASAP you we more likely to go with the one you used successfully with a client 2 months back. Zoom was less bad overall than the competitors at the time.
TikTok was pouring money into ads hand over fist last year. Being targetted, you probably wouldn't have seen many if you aren't the right demographic and visiting the right sites.
Its rise is a sign that the Internet has become just another commodity platform where success is bought, not earned.
> It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts
Plus, there was a time when the competition was things like Discord and Skype (force you to have an account... and a desktop application) and Facetime (forces you to have a phone number, and an app, and a particular brand of phone)
Google products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants.
And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.
There's also the product "treadmill" for chat and video apps that Google and Microsoft have had over the past handful of years.
There is buy-in even for a chat app. I often have to shuffle browsers, may or may not have to install something, have to judge if the other person is interested in trying new software. Does everyone have a Google account? If I'm joining someone else's meeting, what's the process? Is there a meeting id? Password? URL?
Joining a Meet meeting is easy, just like joining a Teams meeting is easy. Both are much, much easier than Webex & Zoom, which irritate with attempts at forcing client software installation.
I /used/ to prefer stuff built into the browser, but after years of pain I greatly prefer standalone software for a/v stuff.
When Firefox transitioned their plugin format they dropped support for over a year (after receiving more than a year of deprecation warning). At the time it require a separate installed plugin (which defeats most of the purpose of integrating with the browser). Safari support has also been spotty.
I really hate Google's account system. I don't even use Google, but find myself juggling 4 or 5 accounts for work, school, family. If I go to `classroom.google.com` I get a "Verify it's you <account I don't intend to use>". I'm expected to click "Next" and click a few more times before I can select the right account.
I don't have direct experience with Teams (I assume it's similar to Google). Being all-in is clearly the easiest solution--using it every day, having it as your only video solution, having an account and staying signed in. The annoyance is the friction that it can't be your only solution and when it's one of many there's a lot of mental energy to jump through the hoops.
Zoom does have a web version and the native app is almost inappropriately too easy to install. Joining a video chat just means having a meeting ID or clicking a URL.
Not really... You have to log out of one account, then login to the other; but then you need to use 2fa; but now 2fa is mad about something and making you jump through hoops while people are getting angry you aren't showing up as scheduled...
It sounds like you aren't taking advantage of browser profiles properly. I have two Google accounts, one personal and one for work, and they live in two separate Chrome profiles, both of which are always open. On MacOS the shortcut for switching between the two windows (when both are open) is command-`
That's totally missing the point. You shouldn't have to have browser profiles to call somebody on a video app. Most people don't even know how to use them.
The browser profiles are quite necessary for dealing with every other Google product too. Every day I'm using Gmail, Meet, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Keep, YouTube, Search, and more. If I was trying to do this all in one profile I'd be logging out and logging in dozens of times per day.
This isn't unique to Google; it applies to any kind of single sign on with lots of different products. You're always better off maintaining separate browser profiles so you can seamlessly switch between them than forcing everything into a single profile and endlessly logging out and logging in on all these different sites. I used to do this with Facebook too back when I was using a different account for work development.
And there's also the "poor man's" version of this which even many non-technical users know about, which is to use Chrome for one account and Firefox for another.
> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.
Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it.
If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update.
They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes for them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.
And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.
> Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update.
If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by default.
> They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes for them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.
That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.
> And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.
What stops you from having both so you can try both? Those Zoom links aren't obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.
> If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by default.
For a new event, yes. For an existing event, I'd have to replace the existing Zoom link.
> That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.
You're assuming the person I want to meet with already has a Google account.
> What stops you from having both so you can try both? Those Zoom links aren't obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.
Because of the confusion I mentioned before. You'll end up with some people in the old meeting and some in the new.
I speak all of this from experience of being in a corporate environment that moved from WebEx to Hangouts. It took weeks to get everyone to switch over and was a ton of work updating all the recurring meetings.
But the overall point is that the switching cost is much higher than just the time boxed meeting.
> That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.
That's not actually an indication that there won't be setup issues. Every new machine my Meet breaks until I hit a bunch of OK boxes and know the secret trick to kill Chrome and restart it before Meet can actually successfully access the camera and share screens and the like.
Had it screw up presentations before where I got a new machine, tried to share a demo window, and of course it wouldn't work until I logged off the call, killed Chrome, and got back in. Big waste of time. Seen the same issue hit other coworkers with new issued laptops.
Clearly other people are smarter than me. I'm not that smart, and I'm a parent, so I take quite seriously the act of choosing which stuff I need to learn to use. If you're young and smart, that probably doesn't matter, you have lots of free time to learn new things.
FWIW, I agree with your "transient product fatigue" sentiment, but had to downvote anyway because this only ever goes back and forth with defense/attack with little convergence.
I suspect only the tech crowd notices this and the general public just gobble everything up, though. We can all just think quietly "ok another experiment, no thanks" and watch where the chips fall in 6 months.
I've been using Google meet as a remote student for a while (Google made meet available for free for education accounts a while ago already) and it's been a great experience, even with large groups of people online. We tested up to ~80 without any problems.
My company uses Zoom and we do our monthly whole company meeting using Zoom without issues. Whole company is roughly around 700 and I've seen us get up to 600 without issues.
a few days ago I was in a zoom meeting with 996 people. The mac client was sluggish on my 2017 core m3 macbook but the audio (and video when scrolling around gallery view) never lagged or went tin-y.
I used Google meet yesterday on a Samsung phone (GS7),and in ~80 minutes almost the entire battery was drained and the phone was too hot to handle. I powered down completely to recharge.
> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.
Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP.
Demanding that your communications partners dox themselves to Google to talk with you is incredibly rude.
it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number
I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was mandatory.
Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security reasons.
It depends on their risk assessment based on all sorts of stuff (perhaps like your IP, browser info, mouse movements etc.). If you're suspicious (VPN, Tor, heuristics etc.), they require the phone confirmation.
Can confirm, I can create a google account on android without phone number but I cannot do so on desktop. When using the android-created account on desktop, it requires (not optional) a phone number.
A phone number on a fully functional google account isn't optional, at least in western Europe (though I doubt another country is better because then people would just VPN to there).
I once did some work for Google that required accounts to do the project (existing accounts weren't a good fit for the project). They couldn't provide us with accounts because it was a huge hassle and another team, so I ended up standing in line for a long time getting my identity verified a half dozen times for various prepaid sim cards with throwaway phone numbers and I think we billed them for it. If there had been another way, they'd simply have told us...
Oh, that's why mine got locked! I've been wondering about that. I hadn't posted a single tweet, yet got notified that my account was locked for suspicious activity.
Same happened to me about half a year ago. When contacting support to get it unlocked, you need to agree to the Google privacy policy. Twitter is lovely these days.
No? The web's security model does not expose such identifiers. The best you can do is fingerprinting, which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers
We used Meet for a little while at work while looking for alternatives to zoom. The prospect of pouring more of our data into Google's coffers didn't sit well (and anyway audio quality was also sub par).
Two fantastic "indie" alternatives for video conferencing at work:
I’ve seen this (requirement for a phone number when signing up) sometimes, even when signing up for a Google account with a non-Gmail address. It’s ridiculous that a company that does so much tracking with reCAPTCHA and many other systems pushes so much for a phone number (which is something most people don’t change).
Why would you give them your actual phone number? Doesn't everyone have multiple "burner" numbers for spammy services, just like we all have for email?
There are dozens of data brokers that aggregate bulk data from hundreds or thousands of different businesses, for millions of customers: hotels, online shops, credit card companies, loyalty programs, travel, supermarkets, movie theaters, all of it. In the US, probably 80-90% of the large organizations you've given your phone number to have sold your activity to a data broker.
These data brokers then provide all sorts of lookup APIs, using name+zip, or phone number, or email, et c. It's basically "user activity as a service", so that businesses that have acquired your email or phone number can know things like what ZIP you're in, how much you travel, what sort of things you spend money on, your income bracket, what kind of car you drive, et c. It allows them to better tailor their marketing communications to you (e.g. if you only fly first and stay in 5 star hotels, they probably shouldn't try to rent you a Camry on the hotel checkout page).
There are many of these companies, and API lookups are cheap and easy. Google itself has also been buying up purchase histories from many companies (including email addresses) so that they can link your email to your buying habits (as well as your shipping/delivery addresses).
Almost all of this is totally unregulated in the USA, and is for sale to anyone who wants to use it.
In some countries you just can just call the phone company and ask. In Denmark you can just call 118, give the phone number and get the address back or use one of the numerous websites that taps into to the same data. Here is the result of a query using a random Danish phone number https://www.krak.dk/97405354/personer
They're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover breadsticks.
Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.
All three of those platforms have released some numbers recently, and both the usage and the growth rate of the usage seems pretty comparable. All of the following quotes are from during April:
One of them says:
> Since January, we’ve seen $SOFTWARE’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, $SOFTWARE is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, $SOFTWARE’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million.
Another:
> We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. [...] We’ve also seen total video calls in $SOFTWARE grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March
And the final one:
> The maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on $SOFTWARE was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid.
The quotes are not from the same time during April, and are not directly comparable in that sense. But if we're talking about the three options being a month apart on an exponential growth curve, it seems premature to call winners.
Google Meet has 100M daily active users... and they're adding 3 million users a day. I don't... think the party is over. Those of us using GSuite appreciate not having to also pay for Zoom, and use it religiously. And its conference room hardware is nice, too. Plus, it's tightly integrated into Google Calendar.
This party is slippering. But the neighbors are partying as well. And they have way more beers.
Google Meet is late indeed, but might gives some peps. It’s already a crowdy market - you forget to mention Messenger as well as some startups. Zoom has taken the lion’s part - apparently - but that’s very fragile share. Users jump from one service to another for many reasons (network issue, I’m used to X, let’s try Y, etc.)
Only the ones with the more beers will be able to stay.
Yes, Zoom won this battle, as Slack had won the first battle for chat, but they have to stay ahead of everyone else.
Every company has Google or Microsoft suite for e-mail and for office stuff. If Zoom and Slack don't stay significantly better, the beancounters will happily cut them out, because Meet and Teams are "free".
I tried using Zoom's web UI yesterday and it is a disaster. Audio doesn't work at all in Firefox without an extension/plugin, and even in Chromium halfway through a meeting the audio just cut out without any warning message and didn't work until I reloaded the web page. Even Jitsi is not as hard to use as Zoom (Jitsi warns you that Firefox isn't supported, but at least it still works fine). Zoom's terrible UI and user experience is going to push people to other services. And no I'm not installing a desktop app from a shady company on my computer.
When we went all-WFH in March, my company switched to Meet for almost all of our meetings (though some use WebEx), and it's fantastic. Audio quality is great, nobody has trouble connecting, etc.
Your confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and entirely different service.
Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong video/voice performance, up to 250 attendees, dial-in numbers, live transcriptions, recordings, screen sharing, etc.
They rebranded it as Google Meet literally two weeks ago. They are killing Hangouts Classic. They have... also spun up Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat) which is... a pseudo-competitor to Slack, and an evolution of Hangouts, but only for GSuite users, with the intent of killing Hangouts Classic (the evolution of GTalk) early next year.
Meet is far more advanced and better supported that the legacy Hangout for a conferencing tool. It is far better, and we really prefer it. (Though, because it also bears mentioning, Google is ALSO working on Duo, which is their CONSUMER video chat program, which has some neat features, like AI audio gap-filling and super-low-bandwidth AV1 codec benefits, which I hope make the jump over to Meet soon...)
Thank you for listing an ecosystem of services that, from my point of view, seem to be overlapping quite a bit.
I hope they can prune or merge some of it, because it sounds exhausting: do I as a GSuite user talk with an external person (say, for a job interview) over a Meet or a Duo or a Hangout Classic... and what are the privacy policy implications of such a choice? Too exhausting!
How come this is hard to do with 100 participants? Not a crypto or video encoding expert, but I'd have thought each participant would have a decryption key for their stream, and this key they would transfer to others by encrypting it separately with each other participant's public key and then broadcast that bundle to everyone. Thus everyone else can decrypt only their entry in that bundle using their private key, and gain access to the shared decryption key for that individual stream. When a new person joins, they add their public key to the central list of public keys, and request that everyone update their bundle to include an entry encrypted with their public key. So basically, from the perspective of the new joiner, each stream would be encrypted until that streamer had updated their bundle to allow the newcomer access to their decryption key. But each streamer would still only need to encrypt their stream once, and then share access to the decryption key only to participants. Scaling wise, sending only incurs the cost of encrypting once - though as a receiver, you'd need to decrypt N streams using N different keys - but is that much harder to do than decoding N video streams in the first place?
If you want a HD stream for someone who is talking, and an SD stream for each person in grid view and users on slow connections, you either need access to the unencrypted HD so you can downsample them, or all platforms to support Scalable Video Coding [1] so you can downsample by dropping otherwise-opaque encrypted packets.
Consider resolution. With non encrypted video, you receive one hd stream. With 100 people, you'd need 100x the bandwidth, and supporting things like highlighting speaking people would need to be done client side.
I honestly thought that was the case already (that highlighting is happening client side, and that my client receives each stream separately). So what you're saying is that currently a central server is performing the task of merging those 100 streams into a single stream for users. So it needs to do this separately for each user configuration of how they want to see the streams?
1. Basically, in a peer to peer topology you’d have 100x99 streams going. Everyone sending to everyone.
2. With a star topology and a central SFU you have 99x2 connections only. Much less bandwidth being used. The economics is that everyone pays the central server.
3. Now, I would wager there is a way to do some sort of sparser version of option 1 with beefy peers playing the part of “supernodes”. I think that’s how skype used to work before M$ bought them and made it less P2P
But regarding the encryption, yes you can have an SFU or whatever but you won’t have adaptive resolution of the SFU or supernodes can’t decrypt your stream in transit.
Yes, large videoconference tools like zoom meet etc. all use a central server to do intermediate processing. One on one (or small group) apps are often p2p, and can therefore be e2e encrypted.
Currently it encrypts the stream using TLS, just swap out that encryption key with one only known to the participants. Generate and share a symmetric key for the call (under the hood, of course; users should never have to deal with this unless they actively seek out the key verification feature) and things would work exactly the same from there, the server just needs to forward traffic.
It might currently not work in a browser because native TLS is way faster than doing the crypto in JavaScript, but in principle it should be equally heavy whether you make it end-to-end-encryption or encrypt-to-server.
I have never used Google Meet, and don’t intend to use it now either. Anyone who wants to have just a group video or voice call with others (close people or acquaintances or strangers) can use Jitsi Meet (meet.jit.si). Jitsi Meet can also be self hosted if you prefer that. Jitsi Meet doesn’t require registration for anyone.
We need to promote getting out of the Google and Facebook webs.
Google has yet to build a chat tool better than the old GChat / GoogleTalk-Gmail integration. It had voice and video (though not amazing quality, but it was 2006) and the chat was top-notch. It worked, it was integrated in my Gmail and it had text statuses which was honestly the best social media I ever used in my college days.
Same. I still miss Google Talk. It was the pinnacle of instant messaging, following and improving upon AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo which preceded it. I used it with Pidgin.
It's all been downhill from there, now that everything is just a web app and you don't have an application that can sit in your systray and open its own windows.
Good news for all the school people that has been using it for learning purposes only (eg my students).
That said there are good alternatives already like jitsi or - time limit apart - zoom.
> Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:
> • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.
So, all participants need to create Google accounts. How convenient for Google.
I don't necessarily want to ascribe maliciousness here—there are certainly user-centric reasons to set it up this way. But, isn't it interesting how many of the security measures implemented by tech companies also just happen to align with their business interests in other ways?
Freedom and privacy are often at odds with security in most areas in life. During war-like situations, security (speaking in the general sense, rather than purely technical) becomes a greater concern, so those companies that have positioned themselves that way will have increased opportunities.
There are other solutions around authentication that would be perfectly fine and still privacy-conscious. It's just that anything other than forcing you to login using a Google account doesn't mesh with their strategy of ensnaring users and adding to their all-encompassing profile of you.
This is great, did they list the financial commitments they made to keeping this product running for a minimum of 10 years? Because I don't see why anyone would migrate to a Google product. If you start using Zoom today, you've got a fair expectation that it will be around for a while. If you start using Microsoft Teams you can be extremely confident it'll be around for heat death of the universe. If you start using Google Meet today, I'd advise you to have a backup plan.
Meet isn't a type of product that takes effort to migrate from. It's per meeting.
Also, it's part of G Suite that they sell to companies, so it shouldn't be discontinued anytime soon. For free for consumer however, nothing guaranteed.
When I've got a calendar full of meetings and they all have meeting links in them then yes, migrating away is going to be a pain- and that's assuming that they just EOL the product, and don't do what they've traditionally done which is to try and force you into one of their other crappy products. I still remember when every youtuber got forced into Google+. Youtube is per video! How bad could it be! Turns out, pretty bad.
Javier Soltero has a long history of getting useful shit built well and in people’s hands, quickly. Nice to see him still at it, not hampered by even Google’s bureaucracy.
> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.
Is it considered acceptable use to create a throwaway Google account specific for this service?
It’s be nice to have a video chat platform not controlled by China for the common man but I wouldn’t want my personal social activity on it to be directly linked to any real Google account.
I use Meet many times per day for business and I'm very ready to move to something else. I am constantly hit with the issue where a user clicks the "ask to join" button, but the hosts nor anyone else ever sees a pop-up to admit them into the room. Super frustrating when on a phone call with a client trying to get Meet to work.
Does this give better sound quality? Because the sound quality on meet (Or is it Hangouts?) has been abysmal for the last few years. I also have no idea what meet actually even is these days. Is it just a rebranded hangouts or did they add something and merge Hangouts in?
Yeah, I had the honor of using their web app and it's significantly worse in quality than Zoom desktop app or Meet's web UI. The video was laggy, showed less camera frames and the UI itself was not responding well either.
The Zoom web app is atrocious. I've been using it these past few weeks and it's an all-around miserable experience. Google Meet is a much superior product compared to Zoom's web app.
Hangouts is rough, but Meet is far better. (Meet used to be called Hangouts Meet, but they're separate products and maintained separately, as they're putting Hangouts out to pasture.)
Meet is their conferencing solution for GSuite, now opened up to the public. It's been around for years.
I recently noticed if you are using Chromebook with certain Bluetooth device, you have to switch to use the Chromebook's internal mic, and it magically fixed the sound quality.
Google Meet is fine, but it's lacking a native app on desktop. Google being Google, my bet is that they'll never make one, and that's a pity. Some prefer not installing apps, but many like this separation. Think zoom, slack, teams, etc.
Can't wait to install another app that does the same thing as 99 other apps on my phone. I mean, it good for everyone, right? A hundred apps with same functionality that I need to run simultaneously because people are using all of them, that should do something for higher end phones
Google's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle.
Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G
It's as if a world of people have chosen to ignore how Google makes billions of dollars a year.
Choosing Google rather than Zoom for privacy's sake doesn't address these concerns.
Nothing is free, especially when Google is providing the service. You are the product.
How are you the product with Google Meet? I can speculate, based on how it monetizes information in its other products. Google is processing all of the conversations through its deep learning systems, harvesting insights about everything discussed.
This heightens privacy concerns 100x from whatever Zoom was attempting.
Where are the activist blog posts about this? They don't exist because Google surveillance has been normalized. It's ok if Google does it.
Google and FB could charge for this in the future, but for now they have to go with the free option. Nobody will switch from Zoom to their offers if it costs the same amount of money.
I honestly have no idea. I think it's scary! I wrote this comment on this thread and it got flagged/removed:
"Remember, you are the product here. Free means they are working with the US government and the NSA, and this is straight up Orwellian surveillance capitalism. It’s a black box with backdoors which not even Google employees could be aware of. The NSA uses dragnet practices.[1] Don’t believe me? (Re)watch both Snowden and CitizenFour.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/"
Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features?
I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.