Quick Thoughts on Google Chat

I’ve been a fan of Google ever since I saw for myself how much better the search engine (how quaint, no?) was compared to the alternatives, and I’m old enough to remember what a revelation 1GB of storage was for inboxes. Chrome in 2008 was a game changer, I’m an unabashed Android fan, and I spend more than half my life in Google Drive.

I’ll never, ever, ever forgive them for their cold blooded murder of Google Reader, but let’s not get hung up on that for now. Feedly is here and it works just fine.

But what was a hobby (learning more about how cool Google can be) suddenly became an utter necessity when the pandemic took over our lives last year. Working remotely has been a challenge for all of us, and utilizing all of Google’s features was no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

Figuring out how to get your colleagues (and in my case, our students) to learn how to use all of Google’s features has been both a challenge and a pleasure, and most of us at the Gokhale Institute are now fairly comfortable with the following tools/apps: GMail, Google Calendar, Google Classroom and Google Drive.

What especially helped was their decision to launch the sidebar on the right, in GMail, that allowed for most (but not all!) of these tools to be accessible from within just the one tab.

One feature in particular that we’ve made fairly heavy use of has been a separate tab for Google Chat (go to chat.google.com). Most of us know Google Chat as that little box on the left in our GMail tabs, but the separate stand-alone tab is much better. You could have chat rooms (about which more in a bit). But most importantly, a separate tab made more sense because visually, chatting was easier in a separate tab rather than those little pop-up windows in GMail.

That apart, the ability to use “bots”, such as Polly for conducting polls and the Meeting bot for setting up meetings((it is a life changer once you get the hang of it, trust me. It uses NLP, and you can type stuff like “set up a meeting with xyz at ten am tomorrow morning” and it does the rest. Yes, really. It is an old feature, used to be available in Google Calendar years ago, but is now sadly missing from there)) has been really helpful this past year.

But yesterday, they announced some serious updates to all of these features. Dieter Bohn has a quick explainer at The Verge, but as is usual with Google, the full feature set will be “coming soon”. But here are my quick reflections on whatever it is that we’re able to to do right now. Note that I work in a university, not a conventional office. YMMV, as they say:

1. Starting projects with colleagues/students is much better in a chat room in Google Chat than via email. The discussion happens much more quickly, responses are searchable, and threaded discussions make it much more convenient.
2. There are three tabs available up top in all chatrooms: the actual chat itself, files and tasks. Files shared in the chat room are now available to see at any point of time, and now they even open up right there, in the chat window. Much more convenient. Note that seeing comments etc requires the document to be opened up in a separate window/tab. Tasks is basically Google Tasks (a tool which almost nobody uses), but assigned to work for the group that is in that particular chat room. Tasks, used as a group, is much better than Tasks in GMail. A richer feature set here would be awesome, but that’s another blogpost by itself.
3. Add in the Polly and Meeting bots to your chat rooms (and please let me know if you know of other good bots to deploy)
4. Stuff I wish they’d add: the ability to pick a message and reply specifically to it (as in Whatsapp) is sorely missed. Conversations would be so much more streamlined if this was around.
5. Chatrooms are searchable by person and by date, among other things. The trouble is that most people won’t know that this is possible, and Chat doesn’t (yet) have the drop-down menu in search like GMail. Most folks don’t know about the drop-down menu in GMail search, but that’s another story.
6. Google Chat now has the same bar to the right that GMail does: Calendar, Tasks and Keep show up over there. Education specific request: throw in Classroom there too?
7. While we’re at it, why can’t all Classrooms automatically have chat rooms created? Why can’t files shared on Classroom automatically sync with this chat room? Why can’t assignments given in Google Classroom automatically sync as tasks in these chatrooms? This would help so much!
8. Setting up a calendar appointment, or starting a Google Meet call is possible from within the little box you use to type messages in Google Chat. When you set up a calendar invite, it automatically invites all participants in that chat, which is great.
9. My own personal workflow involves Feedly, Roam, GChat, GDocs, GDrive, GCal. Hopefully, API’s will allow one to add in Roam and Feedly on to the sidebar in the near future. If that becomes possible, I’m happy to live entirely inside Google Chat when I’m working, with minor excursions into the Twitter tab every now and then. From a purely selfish perspective, maybe Google can buy out Feedly and Roam (hint, hint)? Keep as a note-taking tool just isn’t good enough!
10. Finally, any educational institute anywhere: if you need help learning about this, or setting it up, or just a call where you want to see how we use these tools at the Gokhale Institute, I’m just a shout away. Happy to help, any time 🙂