[HN Gopher] Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs
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Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs
Author : varun_ch
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-03-20 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (varun.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (varun.ch)
| gondo wrote:
| Anjali most likely refers to 'Anjali_Mudra' [0] instead of the
| person's name.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anjali_Mudra
| varun_ch wrote:
| Ah that makes a lot more sense. I don't know how I missed that.
| Thanks.
| kwijibob wrote:
| RIP hangouts. My family chat for many years.
| thfuran wrote:
| RIP Google Talk
| graderjs wrote:
| Me too! Please don't leave, Hangouts!
| sundvor wrote:
| Well over a decade in my case. The new chat is an exercise in
| frustration.
|
| My favourite bug (on Android) is when you paste a URL, hit
| enter to send, then start typing your message related to the
| URL. Because it wants to process the URL, look it up for a
| preview, it doesn't send straight away. However when it does,
| it also includes your absolutely not submitted and presently in
| draft stage beginnings of your next message.
|
| Unreal.
| tramtrist wrote:
| Unreal indeed. I set up my wife's elderly parents in Japan
| with Hangouts years ago so we could video call them by
| actually.. you know.. hitting the 'call' button to ring their
| computer. This worked seamlessly for years with no effort on
| their part. When the computer 'rang' they knew to click
| answer. After hearing that hangouts was going away (what is
| it like 3 times that's been delayed?) I moved them to Google
| Chat but boy was that a mistake. You cannot 'ring' the other
| caller anymore and have to set up a meeting for each call. Or
| you have to set up a perpetual meeting which they can always
| go in to. This has caused us to miss many video calls and
| constant frustration for my wife trying to explain to them
| how to use that function. Why in the world does Google remove
| features in new solutions when they deprecate an old one?
| Can't they simply make a list of things that work in the old
| app and check them off in the new one? I realize zoom is all
| trendy now but geez...
|
| Shoulda just stuck with Skype or something else.
| flir wrote:
| I tried to leave a video chat channel open permanently, but
| they seem to go away after a bit over a day. Experiment
| with sneek, or one of the other "always on" solutions,
| maybe? They come with their own problems though.
|
| They removed a button from hangouts a while back that let
| you send your location to the channel. I guess it wasn't
| used much, but it was useful to me. Made me miss protocols
| and RFCs.
|
| The closed captioning in Chat is pretty amazing, though.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| For me, early Hangouts would frequently get stuck in one of
| a variety of broken states which made it apparent that a
| "meeting" (the eponymous hangout) was a separate thing in
| the system with its own identity rather than just a tuple
| of participants, even for two-party calls. That doesn't
| excuse the UI changes (which I guess were done to
| differentiate the now-business-oriented Hangouts^WMeet from
| the new, consumer-oriented Duo?..), but the underlying
| machinery seems to have worked this way from the very
| beginning.
| easrng wrote:
| You want Duo, not Chat/Meet.
| briandear wrote:
| FaceTime does what you want.
| lxgr wrote:
| On Apple devices.
| morsch wrote:
| Or Whatsapp. Or Signal. Or Telegram. They all work like
| that.
|
| You'd think they designed it like that because it works
| well for their paid use case, using it for work. But no,
| it's really annoying to use in that context to. I can't
| call a colleague, instead I have to add an impromptu
| meeting to the chat, join it myself, wait until they show
| up. I mean, it's just two of three clicks instead of one,
| but still.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Just gotta pony up the appletax to play with the
| facetime.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It was well worth it 10 years ago. My extended family
| almost solely decided to switch to Apple because
| grandparents who did not speak English and grew up in a
| poor developing country could all use FaceTime on iPad
| minis, but no one could figure out how to use
| Hangouts/Skype/etc.
| csours wrote:
| Killing Google Hangouts is a huge FUCK YOU to Google users. I'm
| sure people at Google have heard this, and they have other
| priorities; aka they don't care that they are fucking their
| userbase. I'm quite sure there are technical reasons to kill it,
| but I feel like the real reason is that Google simply doesn't
| want to do any thing that is not currently scaling up. I'm sure
| their cost structure cannot support products that aren't growing.
| I'm sure their culture of career advancement means that no
| engineer wants to be on the Hangouts team. I'm sure that NONE OF
| THAT MATTERS TO USERS.
| takeda wrote:
| Same plan is with e-mail. Run gmail until it's not feasible
| anymore to use anything else than gmail (you can have SMTP
| server with 10+ years, that never sent a spam, not listed on
| any spam blocks, have correctly configured SPF, DKIM but still
| put its mail to spam).
|
| Once no one will run their SMTP gmail will be similarly killed
| using the Microsoft's EEE aproach.
|
| They do this over and over again (even the Hangouts essentially
| killed XMPP). Fuck the cancer that is google. They are actually
| destroying what Internet was meant to be.
| puttycat wrote:
| I've been using Gmail for about 15 years now, with the chat
| widget on the left active most of that time. For years, before
| mobile messaging became ubiquitous, it was my main communication
| channel with friends.
|
| The widget has changed over the years, getting less and less
| handy and intuitive, for no apparent reason.
|
| I would say that I'm an advanced user, to say the least, and I
| still have no idea what is the difference between Gtalk,
| Hangouts, Meet, and Chat (which is apparently the newest?).
|
| What a mess.
| joshvm wrote:
| Canonically you should be using Meet and Chats. These both
| evolved from Hangouts, though I think GMail Chat and Chats are
| interoperable. You can think of them as Slack and Zoom targeted
| towards people who have already bought into GSuite which makes
| sense from an org perspective, though both are usable with free
| accounts. Meet added features more aligned with what people
| expect from modern conferencing platforms (large audience
| casting, recordings, etc). Chat has a way to go before it
| uproots Slack I think, but it offers most of the same features
| for in-domain messaging.
|
| I've been very happy with Meet, aside from some browser quirks
| (blur is not available outside Chrome). It's very easy to
| create a new meeting and it integrates seamlessly with Google
| Calendar.
|
| GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.
| wffurr wrote:
| >> GTalk was deprecated almost a decade ago.
|
| And yet they still run the XMPP servers, though not in a way
| that's usable as chat. They used the same XMPP servers as
| GTalk for Cloud Print, for some reason. And now if they turn
| those servers off, a whole lot of printers with faulty back
| off logic will start trying to DDoS the data centers.
|
| Cheapest thing to do is apparently to just keep running the
| servers.
| tech234a wrote:
| Hadn't considered the DDOS issue before... but why can't
| they just make the XMPP server nxdomain instead so there's
| nothing to DDOS?
| easrng wrote:
| Cloud Print is dead. Another thing that used/uses GTalk's
| XMPP servers is push notifications.
| lima wrote:
| It does seem they finally figured it out.
|
| Chat and Meet are decent, and most importantly, they're the
| _only_ messaging products now.
| easrng wrote:
| Google Voice also counts kinda, also Google Messages
| (SMS/MMS client but also does RCS using Google servers
| sometimes) and Duo.
| samizdis wrote:
| There was an article in ArsTechnica last August - _A decade and
| a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps_
| [1] - that documented Google 's history of messaging/chat
| clients. It's a sobering read.
|
| It was posted on HN and generated 80 comments [2].
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-
| half-...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299727
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I block all of chat / hangouts / whatever via ublock origin. I
| use gmail for email only, I consider the chat client to be
| bloat.
| cj wrote:
| Chat/Meet in gmail can also be turned off in gmail settings.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Does that actually stop Gmail from making the requests or is
| it just cosmetic only?
| LegitShady wrote:
| tbe ubiquity of mobile messaging predates google hangouts by a
| lot.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gman83 wrote:
| I moved from Hangouts to Google Chat and so far it's been pretty
| seamless. What I like about it compared to WhatsApp is how easy
| it is to use across devices... phone, tablet, web. No messing
| about with QR codes, etc.
| drdec wrote:
| For some reason on Android there's a Google Chat app, but
| Google tries to shuttle you into using Chat from within the
| GMail app for whatever reason.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler opinions are my own.
|
| I think they're making Gmail their
| collaboration/communication software. You have email, chat,
| and meet all in there.
|
| I agree, I don't totally understand why they're doing it.
| That's my best guess.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| Seeing this tells me there was probably a passionate and creative
| team behind Hangouts as a product. That's quite in contrast to
| the buggy slow product that it was to use, and the lack of market
| success it saw.
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe they were passionate and creative but also not very good
| at software development?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I'm surprised they are telling people to switch, when I still get
| a message saying my Jangouts older than a year won't show up in
| Google Chat. I've noticed that most of them show up but not all
| of them. One thing I loved about Hangouts was the chat folder in
| Gmail that showed my chat history. I wish they did something
| similar with Google Voice. I wonder how long it will be before
| they try combining Voice and Google Chat.
| graderjs wrote:
| I love the Hangouts animated stickers...I really wish Hangouts
| (and all its Easter eggs) would stay
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I honestly prefer the Google Chat app because it includes
| functionality Hangouts lacked, like search and dark mode.
| graderjs wrote:
| Well, different things are important to different people I
| guess.
|
| I think you can search hangout messages from GMail tho :)
| beebeepka wrote:
| I've been using it for about an year and consider the
| search among its worst features. Otherwise it's not that
| bad. Certainly worse than discord. Haven't used slack in 4
| years. Not sure what it's like now
| throwra620 wrote:
| Someone summarise this for me please.
| blamazon wrote:
| Google hangouts is going away because Google is making yet
| another chat product. There are Easter eggs in Google hangouts.
| You can find them by looking at JavaScript.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Here's the list of the text replacements from the post:
|
| https://pastebin.com/raw/2CG1Cdn6
|
| (HN filters most of the emoji making it pointless to paste here)
| phgn wrote:
| I would have loved some screenshots of these easter eggs in
| action. I don't have anyone to message on Google Hangouts to test
| this out.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler opinions are my own.
|
| If you search around the internet, you can find some full
| screenshots of it as people discovered the features.
|
| https://www.techjunkie.com/google-hangouts-easter-eggs/
|
| Many of the commands that exist, are effectively just text
| replacement where you swap out some / command for a string that
| is an emoji like thing, such as: /tableflip
|
| (+deg#deg)+( +-+
|
| The above was actually added to hangouts by a coworker long ago
| when there weren't as many Easter egg commands (and we worked
| in payments at that time). The fun of having a fully open
| codebase, where you can edit and propose changes to anyone's
| code, you just have to convince them to approve it.
|
| Though I will add, some of the commands actually had animated
| pictures with them, such as /shydino and /corgis.
| edent wrote:
| Maybe I'm getting old - but how do people remember all these
| switches and commands? They aren't intentionally discoverable,
| there's no UI to see them, and there's no explanation of what
| they do.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| They aren't intentionally discoverable because they aren't
| meant to be, they're easter eggs :)
| oceliker wrote:
| I miss the Facebook chat from the late '00s - early '10s, which
| also had easter eggs. The only one I remember is :putnam: which
| showed a face of a person (presumably named Putnam). I wish FAANG
| companies still did easter eggs.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I worked on Facebook maps from 2018-2021.
|
| Zoom in on the lat-lon (0.0,0.0) for a more recent Easter egg
| :)
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Like seven, eight? years ago, Hangouts was everywhere. Maybe it
| was just the communities I dabbled in. Nowadays I actually wonder
| that it still there. Weren't there some other google IM efforts
| in between? A tell-tale of how to loose big.
| takeda wrote:
| Wasn't Google Chat (which also was inter-operating with XMPP)
| that was replaced by Hangouts?
| jpswade wrote:
| Hangouts was great, used xmpp in the beginning and was available
| on most devices so would work across android, iOS, blackberry,
| Mac, windows and web. They screwed it up and WhatsApp won.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| WhatsApp won because it used phone number as login and SMS
| messages as the authentication, automatically copy and pasted
| from the SMS without the user even knowing, ensuring a spam
| free network with zero friction to "log in".
|
| I remember thinking how genius and novel the approach was, and
| all the people in my family, even the old, non English
| speaking, non computer literate people immediately knew how to
| use it. All you had to do was point people to the app, and they
| needed no more hand holding.
|
| Of course, it was also a great cross platform user experience,
| and came about at the exact time mobile phones were blowing up,
| but I think the differentiating factor was the extreme ease of
| sign in, in combo with that same mechanism cutting spam made it
| an obvious choice. Just logging into software with username and
| password was a big UI hurdle back then for the older people in
| my family, and probably still is.
|
| I specifically remember one use case that WhatsApp fixed and
| that google/apple/Microsoft had no answer for. Sharing
| contacts. It was so hard to share contacts with non tech
| literate people, and I do not know why all the other messengers
| by the big companies could not do it, but WhatsApp made it dead
| easy to send and receive properly formatted contact
| information.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I specifically avoided it because the whole "no
| authentication" thing smelled funny to me. Still don't feel
| using MSISDN is right.
|
| Everyone around me loved it, though, so the joke was, once
| again, on me. How come almost nothing I like is popular. And
| vice versa
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| I hear this all the time, but I have never in my life met a
| single whatsapp user. Is this one of those things thats huge
| outside the US?
| laurent123456 wrote:
| It's the opposite in the UK. I can't think of anyone I know
| who doesn't use WhatsApp.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| It is huge in Central Europe at least. Pretty much everyone
| is on it, you would be left out of a lot of functions if you
| didn't have access to it (eg my kids childcare has its
| parents' chat groups there, my building block has a group
| there. In online dating, asking for a number to move the
| discussion to Whatsapp is pretty common... Heck, last time I
| brought my bike into the repair shop, they asked me if it was
| okay if they sent me the status report via Whatsapp).
|
| To be fair though, while Whatsapp is the default messenger
| for pretty much everyone, both signal and telegram also have
| their users, especially with younger people. Eg the
| volunteers for helping the Ukrainian refugees in my city
| organize via telegram, and the above-mentioned bikeshop ended
| up messaging me via Signal.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| That makes sense why it's passed me by then. I do find it
| fascinating how different systems still take hold in
| different places even in the age of the global web tying us
| all together. Just from following the war in Ukraine and
| seeing how tightly the Slavic world has grabbed on to
| Telegram was enlightening too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is huge in the US also. The main feature Whatsapp
| enabled was free international messaging. So it
| immediately blew up in immigrant US populations and
| bigger cities where there would be more international
| connections.
|
| At the time Whatsapp came out, I was in NYC, and I do not
| recall anyone not using WhatsApp. I remember how amazing
| it was to effortlessly chat with my UK family since we
| were no longer subject to super expensive international
| SMS/MMS charges.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| I would consider Viber up there, if not more popular with
| some immigrant communities. I've never used either, but
| it was interesting to see the adoption of it essentially
| driven by mobile users in other countries with family
| members in US--as opposed to the other way around.
| Macha wrote:
| Yes. Similarly I hear a lot about iMessage, but in my country
| (Ireland) no one I know uses it. Whatsapp pretty much
| supplanted SMS, FB Messenger, Viber (which had a good early
| start here) and was dominant enough that it basically left
| iMessage, Signal and Telegram with no way to gain ground
| here.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| iMessages' big advantage is sending and receiving full
| quality images/video. My WhatsApp groups that all had
| iPhones switched to iMessage groups as a result.
|
| Best use case is at a wedding or event or on vacation when
| you want to share pictures/video with others. Simplest
| mechanism is to send it to them via iMessage.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, iPhone market share is lower here, so there's much
| fewer groups with all or large majority iPhone owners, so
| full quality images is less of a selling point than
| "works reasonably for more than half the group"
| [deleted]
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