Google Voice is one of those Google apps that seems to be ignored by Google, and I often wondered if it might suffer the same fate as Google Reader. With the news that Google is readying a new unified messaging service called Google Babel, I became hopeful that Google Voice would be included and might not be doomed after all.
The long-anticipated Google Hangouts application was announced this afternoon at Google I/O 2013 and is now available in the Google Play Store for download.
The app allows for one-to-one chat, group chat, picture/video sharing, emojis, as well as video calling.
Since Google Hangouts was released last week, users haven’t been too happy with the lack of SMS and Google Voice integration. Google has already told us that SMS messaging will be included in the near future, and today a Google member is assuring us that Voice will also be a part of future versions.
Google announced a version of Google Talk for Android that enables voice and video chat, appearing first on Samsung Nexus S phones that have been updated to Android 2.3.4. Also this week, Google released a Google Docs for Android app that lets users turn pictures with text into editable documents....
Emails, for the most part, are static, but Google today launched a new Gmail feature that makes Google+ events notifications more interactive. Gmail users will now be able to invite friends, read and respond to comments, and RSVP right from inside their inboxes. Google+ users will also be able to share photos that were attached to the event.
Well here’s a bit of a game changer for Google’s social layer, Google+. The Google Drive team has announced that starting today you can now share things like documents with your circles and stream on Google+. That’s not new, but viewing these items in the stream is.
Virtually all of Google’s APIs currently support OAuth 2.0, a framework for allowing third-party apps limited access to your data from other services, as their standard authentication mechanism. Starting today, Google is taking its OAuth 2.0 support a step further by bringing it to IMAP/SMTP and XMPP, the protocols that allow third-party access to Google services like Gmail and Google Talk.
You may have been experiencing issues with Google Talk this morning and that’s because Google had a “service outage.” Google explained this morning that they knew about the issue and were working as hard as they could to provide a fix:
“We’re aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users.
Simply put, Google Hangouts is awesome. It’s seamless, it’s cross-platform, and it works really well. At least, it works well so long as you’re not on AT&T’s mobile network. Unfortunately, if you try to video chat when you’re using AT&T’s network, it won’t work.
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