What are on your Google Chat wishlist? | C2C Community

What are on your Google Chat wishlist?

  • 19 February 2021
  • 7 replies
  • 167 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

The general consensus is that people have love/hate relationship with Google Chat. When Slack had outage at the beginning of the year, many Slack organizations had no choice but to resort to Chat as a backup. Compared to Slack/MS Teams, there are many areas of improvements for Chat. What are some of the items on your wishlist?

I will start.

  • Ability to delete rooms
  • More admin controls (who can created rooms, who can post, who can leave, etc., similar to how Google released updated settings for Groups back in 2019
  • Ability for admins to see the group email addresses associated with each room
  • Updated API

7 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +17

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to Chat and Messaging. This latest implementation misses the mark in so many areas when compared with Slack and even Microsoft Teams. Personally, I’d love to see Chat Room and Google Currents coming together, Communities are just Room and some of the concepts in Currents would work really well within a real-time Chat context.

Here is my wish list:-

  • 100% the ability to delete and manage rooms better.
  • +1 for The ability for admins to see the group email addresses associated with each room
  • API access to create and manage Rooms
  • Better threading and UX
  • Search. I like the search in chat.google.com, not less so in gmail. 

 

Userlevel 1

my #1 is to be able to star threads, and a way of viewing all my starred threads.
...we use Chat heavily, and many threads need action/follow-up, but without stars we’re forced to log the request somewhere else…

Userlevel 7

On my wishlist (and something I’ll investigate soon) is an open API, webhooks, bots for integrating Chat, Rooms specifically, with platforms like this and other notifications/messaging. 

I’d love for Chat to play a big part of making Google Workspace the key place where my work happens. Productivity and collaboration seems to be fragmenting further with so many niche apps. If Chat can bring some of those notifications and messages into a team Room, that’d be incredible. 

Userlevel 4
Badge +6
  • thread titles
  • collapse/expand button for long messages
  • star threads
  • notifications by keyword (not just threads or mentions)
  • direct (voice/video) calling
  • audio messages/transcription
  • clearer file-sharing permissions
Userlevel 1

 

also make GIFs work!

 

Userlevel 2

Chat is our daily driver and I agree it could be so much better than it is. My wishlist:

  1. List view indicators - external rooms (this room has external members); info hover (members, last update)
  2. Set room to unread - I click on the room but can’t immediately respond/action, I’d like a way to be reminded I have to revisit the room (starred threads would be good too)
  3. Another vote for thread titles, though we use ctrl-b and write between the asterix for bold titles when starting threads
  4. Grouping rooms - not just pinned/unpinned
  5. Accurately showing if a user is available - my lists don’t seem very accurate; maybe a status a user can set (“in a meeting”; “call mobile” etc)
  6. And +1 for more (or any) admin controls
Userlevel 3
Badge

I would +1 most of the other suggestions people have made and I am conscious that Chat is relatively new and would hope a lot of these improvements are coming, though as @PaulRLees pointed out Google’s history with Chat apps does not bode well.  Perhaps they have learnt from their vast experience in creating and destroying chat applications...4 time lucky…

My biggest ask would be to fix the threaded setup.  With how it currently works finding information, knowing if you have missed content is basically impossible and it is likely in a busy Google Chat room you will miss something or not be able to find it.

I think the threads need a second layer. Similar to the implementation within Twist an app by Todoist which seems to have replicated the best parts of Slack, Chat and Teams but improved in my opinion on the visuals, clean look and ease of use. Being able to set a Subject for a thread and have both a channel/room and a thread within that room or channel which is separated out from the rest of the chat. 

See the screenshot below I took from their intro video. You can see there are two layers to the app.  Channels and then threads.  Whereas within Google Chat it is simply the Room and then the threads are all in the room together and you end up endlessly scrolling to find what you want.

I have no affiliation with Twist I just think its an interesting implementation of the Slack style channels.

 

 

Twist intro 

 

 

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