Hangout Weekend

As you know we always like to try new things and over the last few days we've been testing out using Google's Hangout as an interesting way of communicating, not just here on the blog but back in Secondlife. We use skype a lot, its very popular and is the preferred choice for voice communication for most of us at the GFC and in general as it works very well for the most part.

Hangout works more like a room, so once you have the link or the name of the room (feature of hangout extra) you can then just jump into that room and start chatting with the people there. Hangout has an open door everyone just come and jump in policy.

So this weekend to help test Hangout we've added a button on the sidebar of this blog, just click it and it will launch in your browser. you can select if you want to switch video on or not. From there you select joining the hangout room, if people are there you will see them on cam, showing a screen from their computer or showing no screen at all and just using audio. We are using the Hangout with extras for this as you can specify  a room name which isn't available on the standard hangout you'd find on your google+ page.

There are collaboration tools here as well, you can work on documents and even a sketchpad, so that should be fun. unlike the standard Google hangout you can't use the apps including a nifty youtube app were you can all watch youtube video's together.

Anyway, enough of the nattering click the Google hangout button and come join us in a hangout this weekend. If the room is empty, come join later as someone should be around for much of the weekend.

 To use hangout you'll need a google mail account if you haven't already got one. If you have any problems running it with errors regarding reinstalling plugins the try getting that from HERE.