Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Big Bright Spot for Google+ | Wired Business | Wired.com

Google still struggles to prove the value of its social network Google+; two years in, Timecalls the project “tragic” and “perfunctory,” and the first question at a Google-sponsored “fireside chat” with developers was how to explain, as the questioner put it, “what it is” to users.

But there is, as the ongoing Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco makes clear, one unmitigated success for Google+: “Hangouts,” the video group chat feature introduced along with the rest of the social service two summers ago. Hangout has proven a topic of intense interest at I/O, packing in big crowds, and it’s clear listening to both the audience and presenters that the product is changing how people collaborate in educational settings as well as in certain workplaces, giving Google an impressive lead over rivals like Microsoft in an important and emerging new form of communication.

It’s no wonder that Google announced at this year’s I/O that it’s broadening the Hangouts brand beyond video chat, making it the basis of a new text, voice, and video chat layer intended to subsume disparate Google systems like GChat, Google Voice, and Google+ Messenger. But beyond the official corporate posturing and strategizing around Hangouts, there’s also an organic user story unfolding, which is to say: real people are using this thing in the real world to accomplish actual productive tasks, and they’re really liking it.

Online education is one obvious hotspot. An I/O session on “Online Learning with Google+” was packed as people jammed into a conference room at the Moscone West convention center to listen to stories from a two-person panel on how Hangouts use is evolving within education. The standing-room-only crowd listened intently as Coursera product engineer Pamela Fox ran through lessons her company has learned using Hangouts in conjunction with large online classes, including forming groups prior to gathering students in Hangouts for discussions, and having someone on hand within the chats to guide the conversation and restart it when a Hangout came to an awkward halt.

In a follow-up question and answer session, Fox fielded questions from a teacher, college administrator, and education startup. One member of the audience asked for further Hangouts-in-education tips at a Google+ “fireside chat,” and learned about how MIT has grappled with using Hangouts for the massive audience drawn to online courses offered by the university’s Media Lab. One common challenge: Coordinating student questions and answers through the app, for which one Google staffer recommended setting up a closed Google+ community.

Business types also queued up to ask about Hangouts, including one staffer from the popular online Q&A service StackOverflow, who said Hangouts are used extensively for company meetings but tend to mute background noise too aggressively, and another questioner who said the real-time chat tool “has been phenomenal for our business” but was confused about whether to use the new Hangouts mobile app or the Hangouts feature in the main Google+ app (use the Hangouts app, he was told).

Two years on, Google+ might be taking some licks in the press, as journalists fret over how the service can distinguish itself from competitors like Facebook and Twitter. But Hangouts already offers an easy, and readily corroborated, answer to that question.