[BozemanLUG] Giving Google Meet a try for the next meeting

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

Google decided to open up their Google Meet service to the general public for free.  It was previously a part of their pay services.  I've seen quite a few Google Meet TV commercials so they seem to be spending quite a bit of money to promote it.  Google actually has three video chat/conferencing services: 1) Google Hangouts, 2) Google Duo, and 3) Google Meet.  Hangouts has been around for a while and was part of the discontinued Google Plus social media platform.  Hangouts wasn't really designed (on the back end) to handle large numbers of participants per hangout.  Google Duo is Google's response to Apple's Facetime and is more geared toward phones... but it also does multi-user conferences... although again, I think it has a relatively smallish participant max.  I think Meet is picking up where Hangouts left off... to be a little more modern UI with a much higher participant max to scale up to very large conferences.

Warren Sanders (Billings), Gary and I tried Google Meet the other night... and it actually worked quite well.  My browser didn't freak out at all... so assuming everyone has a Google account they can sigh into Google Meet with, I think we should give that a try for the next meeting.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?

Well, maybe we should just start having our meetings in person again... since the State of Montana is opening back up now?  Our C19 infection rate has been very low (< 500?) and there have only been a small handful of new infections the last few weeks... with the vast majority of them being people who had traveled out of state and brought it back with them.  It might not be a bad idea to wait another month or two.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]