Hangouts are a way to bring together multiple participants in a video chat session – something which has certain been done before – however is implemented in such a user friendly and accessible way that it’s captured my interest far more than anything else on this platform. The potential for using Hangouts to support coaching sessions, webinars, structured meetings and teleconferences as well as informal chats is ripe, and Google are already ramping things up to the next level with the introduction of “Extras” such as screen sharing and collaborative document editing.

While this is all fantastic stuff there are a few more features that I’d personally love to see which would turn Hangouts into an extremely powerful system for businesses and groups alike.

Host controls

If hosting a webinar through a Hangout, with the current system you’d need to rely on everyone staying quiet while the speaker does their thing. By giving “host controls” such as the ability to put everyone on mute while you deliver the main bit of your shpeil, unmuting them when it’s time for questions etc, delivering seminars would become so much easier. Perhaps going a step further and enabling people to click a button to indicate that they have a question, and enabling the host to chose whether to answer it or to click a button to indicate that questions are to be left til the end. For more free flowing discussions, the ability to perhaps set how many active speakers at a time, or to have people flag when they want to speak and essentially “queue” them to come in when the current speaker is finished etc would be interesting options. To make this quicker and more accessible for less technically minded folks, giving people the option to chose I which type of Hangout they want to host, and automatically creating the ruleset for them would be handy too.

Paid and branded Hangouts

The ability to charge an “entrance fee” for a hangout would definitely be attractive to people who run seminars, workshops and training sessions. Of course currently they could arrange payments themselves, adding paid attendees to a specially created “circle” or to their invite list, but by handling the payment/attendee process online this would make the platform so much more attractive as an option for seminar hosts. The ability to brand or customise the Hangout window/interface would be a nice touch too.

Embedded Hangouts

There’s something slightly amateurish about charging for a webinar and then having to direct people to a Google+ hangout – so being able to embed a Hangout on your own website in some way – even just the launch screen – would make this a whole lot slicker.

File Queuing

Again this is related to the idea of having a main host/speaker – but something which I’d find extremely useful would be the ability to “line up” files and videos which I plan to use during the course of a Hangout session. Having to say “hang on while I load xyz” doesn’t reek of professionalism, so if there were a feature to prepare and order all of this stuff in advance so I would simply need to introduce the sideshow or video etc, and then just click on that link on my list, it would make things so much easier.

Pre-scheduled Hangouts

Currently Hangouts are very much real time events. I decide I want to hangout, click the button to start one, my friends see that I’ve got an active session going and then click to join it. This relies a lot on the right people being online at the right time, and therefore if you’re trying to organise something with a bit more purpose or structure you needs to co-ordinate things yourself, away from Google+.

With the ability to schedule Hangouts in advance you could direct people to “sign up”, negating this issue. This would then better enable you to promote your hangout in advance, see who is coming, communicate with attendees beforehand, and have reminders sent out a couple of days before.

Hangout recording

Again something to help extract even more value from conducting a hangout would be the ability to have it recorded as it takes place, with some basic editing options, and the ability to either download the video file or publish it to YouTube.

More than 10 participants

Another one for the webinar types – the current limit of 10 participants is great for informal chats, but is really small for an audience of a webinar or online training session. The option to increase this, perhaps for a small premium, or maybe just restricted to certain “types” of Hangouts, would be a great one. Obviously there are technical implications to this, so I would say that if you were running a webinar, then rather than the thumbnails of everyone in the hangout being displayed, only that of the main speaker shows up. If there are questions, then these are queued and only the person asking the question, and the main speaker would show up etc.

These are just some of the improvements I’d personally like to see in order to improve Hangouts and make them more appealing to those who would be more inclined to use them for business purposes. A lot of my suggestions are related to the delivery on training, webinars etc, and so the response may be that systems already exist for this and therefore Google+ shouldn’t be touched. However software already exists for email, for word processing, for cloud storage etc, yet what Google is doing is pulling all of these together into a central location, and therefore is it not sensible for them to utilise the promising Hangout platform to grab the lions share of real-time video discussion/broadcast too?

I’ve got a strong feeling that some of these sorts of features will make their way to Hangouts at some point in the future, no doubt a lot better thought out and definitely simpler and more stripped down – and if that happens then it’ll be a big tick in the column for making Google+ appeal to businesses in a way which Facebook and Twitter simply can’t do.