[clarkm]

I complained about this for a while, but then I saw someone use Hangouts on mobile. I suddenly realized why Google designed it this way. Of course the designers noticed that it was hard to determine who was offline and who was online. In fact, that's the whole point.

Google is incrementally eliminating the distinction between the online and offline world. Pretty soon, the concept of offline won't exist anymore -- everyone will be thought of as online all the time.

But there's no place for old-style instant messaging in this mental model. So they're moving away from it. But they can't make this change all at once, so they're doing it slowly. When the distinction goes away, Hangouts will be just like SMS. If you think about it, Apple already beat them to this with iMessage, and Google is playing catch-up. But instead of launching a new product, Google is just extending their existing IM ecosystem to take over the SMS space.

[timdorr]

In fact, they will be integrating SMS "soon": http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/google-hangouts-sms-integ...

[aroch]

And yet GVoice probably still won't support MMS, it'll be forced to the hangouts protocol and you'd be screwed if you want to send an MMS to a non-Android phone.

[Ralz]

That seems like a good idea but I only use gchat on my PC, for my phone it's text messages. I don't like it when someone assumes that I'm on my PC and starts to have a conversation with me as when I'm on the go I'm not able to have a serious chat. At least with txt msgs both parties know that you may not respond in time and that you may be brief with your responses.

[noblethrasher]

So do you suppose that is why you can't be invisible when using the iOS Hangouts app?