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Monday, November 23, 2020

Silly, silly Google

Yesterday I ran my West Marches game. Luckily I logged on a little early to sort a few things out. When I clicked on Hangouts to start the video chat, I found out that that wasn't an option anymore. Clicking around, I found out that the new system is Google Meet. And it wasn't really obvious how to start a Meet video conference at first. I see it on the Google quick menu thing this morning, but since every Google service now has the 4-color treatment, I missed it yesterday because it looks like everything else. 

Anyway, we used Meet yesterday for the game. We had a few technical issues with sound, and some people were delayed entering the game, because unlike Hangouts, I needed to grant permission to people to enter the Meet instance, and it didn't always make a chiming sound when someone wanted permission. Since we mostly are looking at Roll20 while gaming, that was an issue. 

Basically, if you have used Zoom (which I use to teach classes these days), you will see exactly what Google is trying to do with Meet. Even though Hangouts was working fine, and I didn't see any big advantages of using Meet over Hangouts. Just inconveniences. 

Like all tech, I'll get used to it pretty quickly, I know, but it's still eye-roll inducing whenever some tech company decides they need to "innovate" just because a competing service is doing well.

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