From the Sorgatron Media Newsletter from May 23, 2012.
Have you played with Google+ yet? One of the first things that caught my eye when it opened to limited numbers about a year ago was something called Hangouts. This seemed like the next evolution in video chat. You find yourself in a window with one large featured video, and up to nine people along the bottom. As you converse with eashother, the view shifts from one person to the other. Since it’s inception, it’s become the way we communicate during meetings, watching events, and more. Every Monday, you can find a few members of the Wrestling Mayhem Show from Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and Texas watching the WWE RAW “together”. Meetings are starting to be scheduled this way n
ow, giving us a new way to see everyone’s reactions.
Now, Hangout OnAir has been rolled out. This is exciting. What OnAir does is allow you to A) stream your Hangout via Youtube and B) post that conversation directly to YouTube after. A tool like this gives anyone one click access to an online version of everything I attempt to accomplish in my podcast studio. If you ever wanted to do a “talking head” show with your friends from all over about video games, politics, or whatever you wanted to talk about, you can do it. This rolled with the tools coming up in Hangout including screenshare, showing whatever is on your desktop. You can do some great things with this tool to express yourself and continue the conversation.
Further reading:
Google+ Hangouts Page
The Best and Worst in One Night
Google’s New Social Search
Afterthoughts:
In the months since writing this, we’ve had some fun with Hangouts OnAir as part of our E3 Coverage on InsertCointoBegin.com, covering WWDC with the Beaver County Times, bringing more people together for some new age medicine discussions, and some side guests for our regular podcasts. I hope to report an even larger event in the near future that’s going to use this. They have also included tools to control the broadcast even better and even a mode for musicians.