Google+ Hangouts: going beyond the status update
All too often, physical distance and frantic schedules get in the way of spending time together, especially during the holidays. But you know what? They don't have to. — With Google+ Hangouts, you can go beyond “status updates,” …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been building Hangouts into its differentiator since launching the Google+ project in June 2011 around 'real-life sharing,' and earlier this month it let users conference people into Hangouts with free voice calls. This mid-December post is the holiday-season framing of that build-out: The Next Web's pickup of the same story highlights On Air broadcast, recording, dial-in voice, and 'live' notifications arriving together.
First-order effects
- Hangouts users gain a synchronous alternative to the feed over the holidays — multi-party video plus dial-in voice means people without smartphones or Google+ accounts can join a call.
- Recording and broadcast capability turns a private group call into content a host can keep or publish, widening who has a reason to open Hangouts at all.
Second-order effects
- Dial-in voice puts Hangouts in direct feature competition with established consumer calling services, competing on bundling video, voice, and broadcast in one free product.
- Broadcast-and-record lowers the barrier for creators and brands to run live sessions on Google+, giving Google+ a usage hook beyond friend-to-friend sharing where it has struggled against Facebook.
Third-order effects
- If synchronous video keeps absorbing features once spread across separate calling, conferencing, and broadcasting products, social platforms will increasingly compete on real-time presence rather than asynchronous status updates.
The trend: Social networking is shifting its center of gravity from asynchronous status feeds toward live, multi-party video as the primary sharing surface.