Hello dear readers. Today I would like to discuss with you Google's Hangouts messenger.
A couple of weeks ago, a reader asked me something in Hangouts and then I realized that I practically stopped using this messenger. I wondered if I was the only one or not, so I decided to ask you, dear readers, about it. At one time, I was a big fan of Google Talk, I considered it my favorite messenger and, whenever possible, tried to drag all my friends to it. Its main advantage for me was saving the history of correspondence on Google servers. Thanks to this, even now I can look at my messages from seven years ago. ICQ and Skype (which were popular seven years ago), unfortunately, did not have anything like that. Otherwise, Google Talk stood out only positively – a simple interface, convenient voice calls, etc.
But when the company transferred all GTalk users to Hangouts, it was as if some psychological block was used by this service. This is largely due to the fact that, unlike Google Talk, Hangouts did not have a native application under Windows, and I consider the web version an inconvenient 'stub': I do not like to constantly keep the open Gmail page in the browser , it is not comfortable. For OS X, you can use the native Messages application and configure Hangouts over the Jabber protocol, but in this case, pictures will not be uploaded, instead, you will be shown a link to a picture on Google+.
Even the fact that Hangouts syncs all your SMS when the corresponding service is turned on does not play a significant role, because Google could not even add the simplest function to 'mark a message as read' when it appears on the status bar or on the lock screen.
As a result, I practically stopped using this service, switching to Skype, FB Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp.
Dear readers, what about Hangouts? I have a few friends who, on the contrary, like Hangouts and actively use it, so I'm trying to figure out whether there are a lot of such people or not.