Another off-topic post, but what the heck — I own this blog! I haven’t seen anything about this, and considering it minorly newsworthy: Google Hangouts doesn’t work very well!

As you know if you’ve visited here before, I’m doing a series of Hangout interviews, and the first three, only one of them worked.

Of the first, I’ll give the a slight pass, because the issue with the interface. I think it is poorly designed (Google Hangout and Google Hangouts On Air are different animals, for example), and buggy (a) I’ve yet to have an invitation sent through the interface actually deliver, and b) the software shuts off one’s mike if it senses typing noise, which is pretty inconvenient when I’m taking notes of the interview), but with UI, the problem could always be in the operator. So maybe I was just a lousy user.

But the second one seemed to go well, but when I went to review the tape, all we got was 34-minutes-plus of a “We’ll Be Right Back” placard, as though we’d be deposited in 1950s TV Land. That, too, could have been my error, except more than a dozen other people have experienced the same failure, according to an e-mail exchange that continues to grow with yet more “me too” comments.

Dori, a Google community manager, answered each one asking for a link if it wasn’t provided and promising the team would look into it. That is, until fellow supplicant Andy Traub asked if there’d ever be an answer, ‘stead just investigation. The short answer was, the recordings are gone and we don’t know what happened to cause them. Sorry.

So, if you use the platform, be prepared not to get what you didn’t pay for. In one of his posts, Traub pointed out:

"Dori, here lies the problem with using most of Google's products. When you're not paying for a product, you are the product. Since we're the product we can't really force Google to provide any better service. If i was paying for it I could demand better service or reliability. Will I continue to use Google Hangouts? yes. Will I rely on Google/YouTube to catalog my recordings? No way."