While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform.
The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?".
It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts (for their work), so when testing this out, never encountered the issue.
I predict they'll change their stance in a few months when they see zoom still crushing them in user numbers, but by then it'll be too late - people will remember meet as that app which is "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"
> "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"
Speaking of that, my last experience with Google Meet in business setting was this: every other meeting someone from our team would disappear in the middle of a call and reappear a minute later. Reason? Google's bullshit random "you need to re-verify yourself and type in your password NOW NOW NOW!" prompt that logs you out until you comply. Since us developers only used our company GSuite accounts for Meet calls (all communication unfortunately went through Slack), the only time we'd get this prompt would be a few minutes into the call.
Can someone from the gaia team change the default cookie validity period down by 20 minutes (ie. from 30 days to 29 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes) to resolve this issue?
As silly as it sounds, it would probably resolve this issue perfectly. As I remember, I always got the login prompt at roughly the exact same time into the meeting, suggesting it's just set to expire after a certain amount of whole days.
Google internally is well aware of this, and in fact one internal tool most engineers use actually has an expiry a few hours short of 24h simply to prevent exactly this issue.
I'd suggest changing it by a 12 hour delta. Then you are likely to start encountering it at the beginning of your day instead of in the middle of anything.
> In some cases, though, many are just wondering how this service hardly anyone had heard of became so popular.
Yeah, the first time I've heard of Zoom was when it landed on HN frontpage for doing some shady stuff on MacOS. Fast forward few months, my wife is asking me if I heard of it, because she'll have to start using it... I was similarly blindsided by the sudden rise of TikTok. These new platforms feel like coming completely out of the blue these days... or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.
> or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.
It's that.
People make fun of me when tell them I like to talk to teens about technology. Why, they ask. Why? Because I learn about all these new upcoming platforms. I ask them "how do you get music now", "how do you share photos", "what do you use instead of Facebook".
And I learn about Snap, TikTok, Instagram, etc. long before they are popular.
These platforms all thrive on word of mouth. Teens still hang out mostly in person in school, so they have rapid word of mouth.
Talk to teens about technology. It will be enlightening.
Remember the creepy VPN stuff marketed at teens that Facebook was doing? They really wanted to see what platforms teens were connecting to and engaging with!
Zoom has been popular for corporate meetings for a while now and I've seen multiple companies use it pre-covid. So when you had to find a video conferencing solution ASAP you we more likely to go with the one you used successfully with a client 2 months back. Zoom was less bad overall than the competitors at the time.
TikTok was pouring money into ads hand over fist last year. Being targetted, you probably wouldn't have seen many if you aren't the right demographic and visiting the right sites.
Its rise is a sign that the Internet has become just another commodity platform where success is bought, not earned.
> It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts
Plus, there was a time when the competition was things like Discord and Skype (force you to have an account... and a desktop application) and Facetime (forces you to have a phone number, and an app, and a particular brand of phone)
While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform.
The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?".
It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts (for their work), so when testing this out, never encountered the issue.
I predict they'll change their stance in a few months when they see zoom still crushing them in user numbers, but by then it'll be too late - people will remember meet as that app which is "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"