by Chris Taylor
Hands up if you've ever been in this situation: You start a conversation with a friend or family member at your desk on Instant Messenger. Away from your desk, you send them a text. Later on, you decide it makes more sense to speak face-to-face on Skype.
All of a sudden, you've got a balkanized conversation. And it's far, far worse if you're trying to involve multiple people. You quickly get to the point where you can't remember who said what to whom on what service on what device.
Wouldn't it be easier if it was all unified — if there was one conversation app to rule them all, on PC, tablet and mobile? Where you could pick up the conversation whenever, no matter what the platform, no matter what the year?
Guess Who?
Google has long been in a perfect position to dominate the realm of chat. The Hangouts service is the gold standard of video messaging. It's incredibly easy to add up to 10 people to a chat, and more importantly, to do fun stuff with them — share your screen, watch a video together, even wear silly hats and disguises.
Never has a more powerful piece of face-recognition tech been used for a more whimsical purpose. Google understands that wherever groups gather for social reasons, they need something to do. You need conversation pieces. You need the fun stuff. (In that vein, the company has created 850 new hand-drawn emoji for Hangouts' text chat feature.)
I've tried chatting with my family on Skype and iChat; both tend to slow down or break down, and a pleasant conversation devolves into a tech-support session. Google Hangouts just work. (Well, nine times out of 10 ain't bad.)
Until the company launched a standalone Google Hangouts app Wednesday, it was easy to be unaware of your option to Hangout on mobile. This was because you had to do it via the Google+ app. Mountain View doesn't miss an opportunity to push its social network on you. And that kept a whole load of less tech-savvy users — read, parents — at bay.
But to Google's credit: Now that it has decided to push Hangouts as a standalone service, it's pushing its capabilities to the limit. Facebook has chat heads; Google just vaulted to the head of the chat world. All that's missing is SMS and iMessage integration. But it's already starting to look like those services, at least.