Google reminds us that Google Chat can be used with friends
While Messages and RCS is how Google wants you to message friends, Google Chat also fits that role and the company today reminded people of that personal use case.
Google is out today with a “7 new Google Chat features to easily message friends and family” blog post. The additions are quite straightforward from Smart Compose to the ability to edit messages and quote them. Other highlights include read receipts for group messages, inserting links, automatically hiding inactive DMs and spaces (after seven days), and third-party Chat apps/integrations.
The more interesting thing today is the framing of Google Chat as being more than just an enterprise communication tool. [Just to recap: Google Talk (gchat) > Google Hangouts > Hangouts Chat > Google Chat.]
In 2021, the classic Hangouts to Google Chat migration began for free users. Since then, they’ve been able to use what was ostensibly a work-focused communication app for personal usage. At that time, the company positioned the free Chat as helping you collaborate on personal projects with Spaces (originally Rooms) somewhat akin to Slack and Discord.
However, the focus has clearly been on enterprise usage and today’s framing comes as a bit of a surprise that Google wants Chat to court this audience in anyway. The Chat and Spaces tabs in Gmail are not enabled by default and require a trip to settings compared to the Meet integration.
Meanwhile, the listings for the standalone clients very much reveal the focus:
Google Chat is an intelligent and secure communication and collaboration tool, built for teams. From ad-hoc messaging to topic-based workstream collaboration, Chat makes it easy to get work done where the conversation is happening.
The app is fine for personal communication if you can get people to use it. Google Chat’s big advantage would be that Gmail is already on every Android phone. That experience, along with the standalone app, is modern enough with a dual-column tablet UI to boot. In fact, we expect a big “Timeline” home screen redesign later this year and possibly a new icon.
However, the end of gchat and even (classic) Hangouts undoubtedly impacted user trust, while Google for a time was telling people to use Allo.
The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other. From an experience standpoint, Chat is available natively across multiple instances without requiring QR code sign-in, while an email address is a better identifier than a phone number.
However, in terms of institutional commitment, Messages is the clear choice for personal communication and has strong ties to Android. Google Chat can be used similarly, but it will always be enterprise first unless something radically changes.
Source: 9to5Google
