Improve Hangouts

There used to be Google Talk. Great app. Great name. You new what is was about. Then came Hangouts, Voice end Messenger, I do not know in what order, and Google lost the battle with the competition. Now all four are intergrated or replaced by Hangouts, more or less. Which is better, because why have four applications if you can put it all in one? But still, Hangouts is winning any territory back from the competition, is seems. In my opinion there are a few reasons for this.

First of all: the name. Google once started with a chat app called Talk. Which is what chatting is about: talking. Even if you add phone functionalities (Voice) and video chatting (Hangouts), Talk is still a great name and it still tells you what the app is basically about. But what does Hangouts mean? A Hangout, we hang out, let's hang out. Sounds like you want to go outdoors because the sun is out. Does not sound a chat application. It does not.

Then speed. One of the great feautures of Hangouts is, you can use it on your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, home computer, work computer and actually any computer with a browser and internet connection. But in my experience, on all devices Hangouts is not really that fast. Whether I 'hang out' on my work computer via it's own URL, on my home Chromebook, Nexus 7 tablet or Nexus 4 phone, Hangouts is slower than I would hope and expect from Google.

Thirdly, pictures, video's and other files. Or the lack of other files and video's. Because you can share jpg, gif and png files over Hangouts. No pdf's, no mp3's, no doc's, xls's and no video's. And why not? I don't know? When I'm at home chatting with someone at work via Hangouts, why do I need to send a separate email if I want that person to print a pdf for me? I shouldn't have to, I should be able to send it via Hangouts. As well as Excel sheets, Power Point presentations and what have you.

And lastly, integration with other apps. I loved it when Google opened Hangouts up for SMS and MMS messages. But later Google created a new Messenger app just for SMS and MMS. I still wonder why. And also, Google acquired Meebo a while ago. I was expection more integration with other messenger apps as a result of that acquisition, but I've seen nothing so far.

So in summary, good job on replacing four chat applications with one, but please Google, work on that name, the speed on all platforms, the capabillities of sharing files and make Meebo's fuctionalities visible, please!