I stayed in touch with ALL the cool people in my life with this one weird trick.

Hello friends and family,

Here’s an idea for you, do yourself a favour and give it a try:

First, log in to your Gmail account, henceforth called your Google Account (Gmail).

Now that you’ve done that, head to the sidebar where your display picture and chat list are and click on your display picture (you will see the options shown over there).

Right at the top, click on “Try the new Hangouts”. You will be shown a message explaining Hangouts, and though it will seem foreign, click OK and once your email reloads, you are ready to start exploring Hangouts in all its glory.

For starters, once you’ve taken the above steps, you can click on the new chat search (called “New Hangout”) and start typing my name. Depending on how close friends we are, my name and photo should show up right away and you can begin typing out a message to me. Say hi and I’ll welcome you to the wonderful world that is Hangouts!

Now that you’re all connected and ready to go, it’s time to discover what you can do with Hangouts. If you head to Google+, you will see that your same chat list will appear on the right side of the window. If they’re not there yet, click the Hangouts button at the top right of the window and they’ll pop up right away.

You can start a free phone or video call from your computer, iOS or Android device (download the Hangouts app here from your phone, this page also contains a ton of info about the app).

This week on +Future Tech Chat, we will be discussing all of the details of Hangouts, and comparing it to the myriad other chat and video apps available to you, and hopefully we can convince you that Hangouts is the place to be.

As a final note, while Google+ is awesome, it definitely isn’t necessary to use Google+ in order to use Hangouts.

You can check out the discussion on Hangouts and other chat apps here too, starting live at 12:30 PM EST on Saturday, March 22nd, 2014. If you’re reading this after the episode has aired, the video will be watchable in its entirety. Hope you like it!

And remember to tune in to +Future Tech Chat every week for a new episode. We’re also starting a blog which will cover tech questions and cover topics like this.

Follow us @FutureTechChat on Twitter or Future Tech Chat on Facebook, and be sure to subscribe and follow on YouTube and Google+ to stay up to date!


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