Hangouts vs Everything else!

Kadeaus

August 6, 2013

Share:

Today i watched The +Google Plus Week TV Show and it brought to my attention that there is a disconnect . During the show +Jon Pankhurst Asks,

“Can we talk about the new Hangout Chat experience?

+Allen Firstenberg asked him to elaberate and he went on to say that he had tried it and he didnt like that he couldnt call from chat and he had to dial from a hangout. he also said it doesnt show that he is online and so he switched back. This was opened up to the panel for discussion.

Most of the panel seemed to complain that they were disappointed because the indicators for who was online vs idle, or offline was removed. One of the many things that i have started to realize is we are starting to have a disconnect between the Old Techies and the Young Techies. Interestingly, Old and Young isnt nessesairly relating to age, but more relating to how resistant to change the individual have become when it comes to technology and I will get to that in a little bit. I polled a few people after the show was over just to see what the response was among my circle of people. It appears that most of the people in my age bracket stopped using AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo and others around 2007 – 2008. It turned out that people from my circles were using SMS to communicate more than the actual platforms. Most of those people said because they didnt want to be tied to a desktop just to instant message. It make things easier beacuse they could be mobile and stay connected. Interestingly this was around iPhone launch time as well.

Once the iPhone allowed for App development +WhatsApp came on the scene and basically revolutionized the way people communicate on mobile. It brought Instant Messaging like features to an SMS style of communicating. You had the ability to send photos, GPS location, people could see what you when you were typing and after your sent whatever you wanted to send, you could see the when the other party read it. later versions even introduced Group messaging. By all means this wasnt the first time something like this was on mobile. You had the sidekick which had AOL on the actual device and it worked EXTREMELY well. Also Blackberry who had their BBM which did most, if not all of the same things. But +WhatsApp was the first time something like this arrived on a mainstream device.
\nAnd the timing was right. Afterwards they broke down the barrier that, from my perspective, prevented the previous attempts by others from being sucessful. They went cross platform. No matter what platform you were on you could still reach the people you wanted to communicate with. SMS with Instant Messenger Like options. All this, in addition to the fact that international charges were now nonexistent because everything is being carried over the data network, people start using this as their primary means of communicating. Particularly the younger teen crowd.

This is where the Old Techies vs Young Techies come in. While the Young’ns are begging their parents for smartphones and iPod Touch devices so they can join in the group messaging and picture exchanging with their friends, The Old Techies are still using what they knew because it works. (valid excuse)
More of these +WhatsApp Like services started popping up, KiK Messenger, +Kakao Talk, Line, and others were trying to one up WhatsApp in various ways, but it lead to the slow death of the old instant messenger platforms because most of the people were going where their friends were going. This is the same thing we see with +Google+ as the main excuse people use for not using Google+ because “their friends wont switch over.” This Method of communicating became so mainstream even Apple decided to put their right foot in and shake it all about, with iMessage.

So when it became known that +Google was planning on merging Google Talk, Google Chat, The Huddle, Messenger+, Gmail chat, Drive chat and everything else i missed into one unified messaging system, my first thought was that it would be like most of the services i listed above. and with Google Voice integration it would be WhatsApp with iMessage combined.

Once the product launched, it appears that most of the complaints (that are not glitches) are generally coming from the Old Techies who dislike the service because the many features from the instant messaging world has been removed. But these are features that the masses hasn’t used for a few years and some of them have never used them because they are so young.

+Sreek Menon continued to say that they did this to rapidly and they they should of bridged the gap, but from what i can see, the bridge started a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bHTSathehDo#!
at 2:17:39″