Try out Google’s new unified cross-platform messaging service – Hangouts

Google delivered plenty of news at the I/O 2013 yesterday. One of the announcements we find interesting is the launch of the new cross-platform messaging service called Hangouts. Hangouts is going to replace some of the Google’s services including Talk, Voice and Google+ Hangouts. All these old services ensured real time conversations, but Hangouts will deliver far more. It is a stand-alone application available for Android, iOS and web, which ensures a seamless conversation experience.

Hangouts’ home screen features different conversation lists with users ‘pictures on the left side and a plus icon at the top for starting a new message. On the left hand site there is also a scroll bar for a quick navigation through Hangouts. You can chat with either one friend or a group of users. If you hit a plus during a conversation, a new window will pop up showing the six most frequent contacts in your list, so you can add them to that conversation. Hangouts has an option to set up a text discussion or a video conference. The app design is in accordance with the latest trends used in Google+ and YouTube and Hangouts supports high resolution media content including pictures. Google promises that all conversations can be available forever, unless you want to delete them.

Google finds the possibility of saving the conversations for an amazing opportunity to stay closer to your friends and family and never lose anything important. The online users from your list will appear as small icons at the bottom and if you start typing, the window expands. If you want to start a video conversation, you can just tap on the icon on the top right side of the window. Importantly, all messages will be synchronized across different platforms. That means if you read a message on the Android platform, it will be marked as read on the other platforms and vice versa.

Google Hangouts is one of the many announcements made at the Google I/O 2013 conference. Stay tuned to find out more exciting news.

Source: Thenextweb