Google Chat (before Hangouts Chat)

2020: Change of the name with Google Chat

On April 9, 2020 Google announced renaming of services for corporate communications of Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Now they began to be called Google Chat and Google Meet respectively.

Rebranding happened against the background of a pandemic of a coronavirus of COVID-19 which urged on demand for tools for remote work of employees, including on Hangouts services.

Google renamed corporate services Hangouts

It is curious that Google separately did not announce change of the names Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, and were limited only to the story of security and confidentiality of Meet. However renaming was confirmed officially on the page of support Google Hangouts — it was called as Google Meet Help.

By April 10, 2020 rebranding happened not complete. For example, search results on Google Meet lead to links to the old Hangout Meets application.^[1]

According to the statement of Google, after the outbreak of a coronavirus of COVID-19 use of Google Meet increased by 25 times — by April, 2020 concerning January.

The company also noted that in Google Meet the set of instruments of protection against abuses is implemented to ensure safety of work of employees. Affirms that Google Meet complicates program selection of identifiers of conferences — when the malefactor tries to guess ID and makes unauthorized attempts to join sessions, using codes 10 characters long with combinations from 25 characters.

We limit capability of external participants to join a conference more than in 15 minutes, reducing thereby a window in which it is even possible to undertake the attack bluntly. External participants cannot join a meeting if they are not invited in the calendar or were not invited by participants of a command. Otherwise they should request connection to a conference, and their request should be accepted by the participant of the organization which created a conference, said in the blog.

2017: Announcement

In March, 2017 Google announced two tools for corporate communication which develop within the Hangouts project. It is about the Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat applications.

Hangouts Chat represents the corporate messenger allowing the staff of the companies to communicate with each other and to exchange files, separating conversations on discussion subjects. The service competing with Slack support work with documents, stored in Google Drive and Google Docs and also integration with third-party products, such as Box and Asana.

In Hangouts Chat virtual assistants which, for example, can be used for automatic planning of meetings in Hangouts Meet are implemented.

New solutions from Google in fact separate Hangouts service into two that can confuse the users who got used to correspond and create video conferences in one application.

Hangouts is focused on private users while Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat is an attempt to attract corporate audience. In Google did not announce methods of monetization of new projects.^[2]

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Notes