Google no longer wants you to hang out anymore, rather it just wants you to meet up. Confused? This comes as Google has changed the name of its Hangouts Meet service to now simply Google Meet. The rebrand was revealed yesterday in a Google Cloud blog post written by two of Google’s directors of product management, Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Smita Hashim. Along with the new name, the blog post lists a number of privacy measures that Google Meet employs to keep remote meetings from being hijacked – something which the company wanted to emphasise following some of the disastrous security issues that have been raised over Zoom.
In an email to The Verge, Google confirmed that it has officially changed the service’s name and that Meet is officially an independent part of G Suite, the portfolio of business services that also includes brands such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Hangouts Chat, the text-messaging arm of the Hangouts brand, is also part of the suite.
The name change might seem a bit superfluous to many as few people were using the former Google Hangouts service anyway. It appears that following the whole COVID-19 outbreak that its usage has once again skyrocketed, with people and companies enthusiastically adopting the G-Suite of tools.
The rebrand does still appear to be a work in progress, with the program still going by the name of Hangouts Meet in the iOS App Store and its G Suite landing page. Expect those to be updated over the next few days as the company finalises its rebranding of the service.
Last Updated: April 9, 2020
New Age Films
April 9, 2020 at 15:16
Bruv, you need an editor. This sentence goes against everything that is holy on this holiest of holy days.