I was forced to delete my Google+ account recently. The problem is it was interfering with work. My office has Gmail for Work because it’s cheaper and more reliable than Outlook. And it comes with several features too. We’re using Google Docs constantly, and alot of conversations in Google Talk. Or rather were. The problem is Hangouts. Everbody was upgraded to Hangouts, and it’s completly broken.
There are a shit ton of missing features: First, there are only two states: available and unavailable. XMPP has at least a half dozen: available, busy, away, idle, disconnected, mobile. And since Talk was built on XMPP, it meant you knew why someone wasn’t answering your IM. If the message was undeliverable, you were warned, but Hangouts claim that all messages will be delivered. This is a lie.
Second, it doesn’t use a “buddy” list. It will connect to anyone with a Google+ account. And the only identification is your name and photo. So if there is someone who works at Google with the same name as you, you’re going to get a bunch of random IMs.
This hit the perfect storm at work. Since everyone has a personal account with the same name and a photo that matches, it’s impossible to tell if someone will get the message. I have never used Hangouts, but because I had logged into G+ on Chrome, and had not explictly logged out, I was showing up as “available”. I never saw any of these messages. I missed an important impromptu meeting because they contacted my private account.
So I tried to find out how to stop people from using my personal accout. I tried un-circling and blocking coworkers; that just made me “unavailable” as if I had logged out. The only way to remove myself of their list of contacts is to delete my account. And before you tell me that this is a lot of whinging for a free service, I’d like to remind you that my work account isn’t. In fact the problem only lies with the account that we are payng for.
This goes on the pile of things that make Google less useful to me. The new maps engine won’t let me save directions. Google docs no longer lets you save something as a template. Search no longer lets you know what’s an ad and what’s a search result until you mouse over. I’d rather not deal with them anymore, and have starting moving what I can away.