official definition

google hangouts was the new product google released alongside google+, google’s new social media to rival facebook, twitter, tumblr, and instagram, which were all rapidly gaining popularity. hangouts was widely adopted since it was available to anyone with a gmail email address and available on all platforms and softwares. hangouts allowed conversations and video calls with two or more people, with conversations, including photos and videos saved in the cloud.

imo

google hangouts was the main way i stayed in touch with my friends before we all had smart phones. i had the app downloaded on my ipad mini, and it was always available on the family desktop computer. we treated it as our main way of messaging one another. in seventh grade, four of my friends and i had one group we talked in everyday despite the fact that we barely acknowledged one another in person. over time, this group expanded to around 10+ people, which lead to smaller google hangouts groups being made. it remained a fun way to stay connected after school.
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side note: (this was the main way i talked to the boy i liked) (he flirted by sending “encoded” messages to me by putting them through a random language in google translate) (it was romantic at the time)

in review

we would occasionally use the video calling feature to do homework together and hang out. hangouts offered plenty of filters, one in particular allowed you to draw on your friends’ videos. it was also the preferred way to communicate for school projects, since almost everyone already had a gmail account, but not everyone had a phone. the only reason we stopped using google hangouts was because we all got iphones and started texting instead in high school.

i have absolutely no critiques for google hangouts. it was perfect and served its purpose.

a brief love letter to google

google hangouts had a lot of fun easter eggs, like if you typed “~=[,,_,,]:3” nyan cat would fly across the screen and “/ponystream” beckoned a line of my little ponies to run on top of the message bar. before “google hangouts,” there was “google+ chat” and “google buzz” which i also used in middle and elementary school. since its termination this year, all of my old google hangouts are still saved to my gmail account as emails. it has been replaced with “google chats” as part of the “google meet” suite, which functions pretty well, i just don’t have the need to use it anymore.