Hands on with Hangouts, Google’s new text and video chat architecture

XMPP support remains for clients, but federation with Jabber is out.

Sean Gallagher – May 16, 2013 5:10 pm | 71

Welcome to your new Hangout.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Yesterday Google released Hangouts, the company’s new video, voice, and text chat application. Previously known internally to Google by the codename “Babel,” Hangouts consolidates the previously disconnected Google+ video Hangouts, the Google+ Messenger chat application, and the Gmail-connected Google Talk platform into a single app and architecture. Hangouts isn’t just an app—it’s an entire real-time communications architecture overhaul with deep hooks into Gmail and Google Drive. And while it doesn’t yet span all the real-time communications options—SMS support is reportedly in the works, while support for Google Voice has not been discussed—Hangouts poses a significant challenge both to Apple’s iMessage and Microsoft’s Skype because of its cross-platform support and relative openness.

The extent of that openness wasn’t exactly clear from Google’s presentation of Hangouts during yesterday’s marathon Google I/O keynote presentation. Nothing was said at the time about what the changes would mean for developers and users of software that had previously connected to Google Talk. As it turns out there’s good news and bad news.

During a “fireside chat” with the Google + Platform team today, Vice President of Engineering Chee Chew cleared the air over questions about how the consolidation of Google’s chat applications under Hangouts would affect users of third-party chat tools like Pidgin and Adium. Chew also addressed the matter of businesses which used the Extended Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to connect their private IM systems to Google Talk users in the past.

Like Google Talk, Hangouts archives chats. Hangouts also allows photo sharing within chat and stores photos to albums. But this new functionality, much like the video and voice previously supported in Google Talk, is limited to Google’s own Android and iOS Hangouts apps and the Chrome-based Hangouts client.

The Hangouts chat interface, along with its plethora of emoticons, here in its Chrome browser plugin version. Credit: Sean Gallagher

Hangouts chat is archived into Gmail’s inbox as it happens, so you can search content by participant and chat text. Credit: Sean Gallagher

For non-Chrome users the “legacy” Google Talk interface to Hangouts remains built into Gmail and video Hangouts can still be launched from within Google+. Hangouts also still archives chats to the Gmail inbox, making them searchable within Gmail (and within Google Search for those who are part of Google’s Gmail search integration trial).

You can also launch a Hangout again with someone from within the Gmail archive or use the legacy Google Talk interface to start a hangout from any Web client. Credit: Sean Gallagher

For science, here I am hanging out with myself on video. Hangouts also allows video stills to be captured to an archive album, so you can “save your favorite moments”—or the text on that white board in your conference chat.

Good news, bad news

There’s some bad news that comes with the new Hangout architecture, at least for others who want to have interoperability with Google chat users on the server side via XMPP. Google will not allow server-to-server connections. Chee Chew said that “we haven’t seen significant uptake” in federation with Google Talk via server-to-server connections. The majority of the uptake Google did see was from organizations or individuals looking to bombard Google Talk users with chat spam, Chew said. As a result, server-to-server XMPP has been left out of the consolidated Hangout environment.

That means that users of Jabber, OpenFire, and other open-source XMPP-based instant messaging servers won’t be able to tie into Hangouts through their own systems and will have to have separate Google credentials to chat with Google users. But it doesn’t mean that Google has euthanized XMPP completely, as some have reported.

The good news is that Hangouts will still support client-to-server connections via XMPP, though only for one-to-one text chat. That means that Web and client-side chat applications that have used XMPP to connect to Google Talk will still be able to see presence information about their contacts in Google+ and chat with them via text in Hangouts.

That news will come as relief to users of multi-service IM clients such as Adium, Pidgin, and Web-based and mobile tools like Imo and Xumi. It will also be a relief to Microsoft’s Office.com team, which just added integration between Microsoft’s Web e-mail client and Google Talk.

On the whole, Hangouts is a badly-needed update to Google’s chat infrastructure. It kills the somewhat pointless Google+ Messenger and builds successfully on the best of Google Talk while adding features that others had long ago added to their more platform-specific products. The archiving capabilities will be welcome among business users and consumers alike. Businesses that are users of Google Apps Vault, for example, and need to preserve communications for regulatory reasons or e-discovery will be especially happy about the integration with Gmail’s inbox.

The preservation of XMPP for clients also shows that Google is at least making an effort not to alienate people who have a need to use multiple IM providers. It’s also a recognition that not everyone yet lives in Larry Page’s perfect universe.