Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
blog.google
blog.google
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.
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.
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.
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.)
People actually understand the difference between the various Facebook products, unlike the Google products.
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.
Any complete business suite has to have videoconferencing.
Do you genuinely think the P/L for G Suite isn't remotely positive, or will be over the next decade?
Remember it's the primary competitor to MS Office, and has been around for nearly a decade and a half at this point.
[0] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...
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.
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.
How about they stay out of a market unless they're innovating.
I've not seen them nail any of this stuff.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I'm well aware that Hangouts still exists.. I use it often. But Google has every intention of deprecating it.
Example: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime.
Hangouts is old school Google+ tech, the whereas the others use newer tech. E.g. There is some impressive tech behind Duo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in..., https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....
Left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and that, will probably lead to splitting the audience and everything being killed off
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.
Duo is FaceTime for Android.
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!)
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.
[1] https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo
[2.1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat...
[3] https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Plat...
[4] https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/i...
[5] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-...
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.
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.
It's not going anywhere.
Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
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.
Very few, including GMail users, know about Meet.
Meet missed a big - perhaps once in a decade opportunity.
Users already have Zoom on their phone and computers. There is 0 reason to use Meet if they were not already.
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.
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.
At least they no longer block you from using the website if you’ve disabled camera access.
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?
But why doesn't Meet have these features already...?! ️
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.
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.
It's not just rude. It's an F-you to the user.
I'm gonna go file a feature request.
I have used Meet a lot both personally and professionally this spring and I think it's great. Been waiting for this announcement!
Urs said stop breaking things, so we did.
When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993.
In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution.
I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to people.
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.
My only other complaint is that my world (DoD health) blocks Most of G Suite.
I'm on Firefox/Mac and has worked fine for me.
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.
Do you meet people in person?
I recall there being an option in settings where you can limit the send quality of the video.
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?
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.
If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.
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"
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.
https://9to5google.com/2020/04/25/google-meet-zoom-competiti...
Also, from the article:
> 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.
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.
That's a great point. I will talk to teenagers about tech more.
Its rise is a sign that the Internet has become just another commodity platform where success is bought, not earned.
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)
So this announcement doesn’t target family hangouts, but the product doesn’t either.
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 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?
I think "mental space" is quite appropriate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re: your corporate switching experience ... this is a failure of the company culture, not a technology problem.
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.
You should edit them out though, otherwise you are going to have people click the link they always used to click.
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.
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
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...
Google still asked for a phone number
Google asks me a dozen times a day to enable Location Services. Yeah, right.
I imagine Google to be similar.
... except the dominant one (at least for their own web properties), who just happen to be the adversary in this particular discussion.
Two fantastic "indie" alternatives for video conferencing at work:
And it's improving pretty much weekly lately.
And you can host it yourself very very easily.
I'm a _big_ Jitsi fan.
(They've got an experimental P2P E2E encrypted trial running too, which will be pretty cool when it's rolled out across all browsers and mobile...)
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.
Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.
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 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.
If Meet really works well, they could grow quickly.
When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout.
My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?
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...)
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!
And the former is easier than the latter.
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.
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.
We need to promote getting out of the Google and Facebook webs.
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.
> • 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?
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.
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.
You have to click to download the app, then cancel the download, and the link to join via browser appears.
Significantly worse experience.
Meet is their conferencing solution for GSuite, now opened up to the public. It's been around for years.
Still a bug that should be fixed though.
Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G
But yeah let's single out the only alternative that's actually worse and give that as counter-example.
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.
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/"