Google Hangouts gets SMS, location sharing and inline-GIF

At its “A Morning with Google+” event, Google has announced some neat updates for Google+ as well as Google Hangouts. Most importantly, Hangouts now gets support for SMS, animated GIFs as well as location sharing.

You will now be able to simply send a map of your current location on Hangouts to your family and friends. What’s most important is that Google will now allow you to read and send SMS messages from within Hangouts, instead of making you go through the tedious process of opening another application to read it. The SMS messages will appear quite like IMs inside the Hangouts app.

Location sharing, SMS and inline-GIF support. Cool, isn’t it?

Users are also going to love using the inline GIF support feature on Hangouts now. Besides using those cute critter-stickers Google had made available via smileys, you will be able to send any kind of GIF and it will play within the application.

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Google says that broadcasters will now be able to schedule Hangouts on Air and promote them with a dedicated watch page now. Once live, the Control Room feature will let broadcasters moderate the conversation, including ejecting and remote muting. In both cases, Google says that it has improved voice calling quality overall. It’s now full screen on both mobile and desktops and it fixes and enhances webcam lighting by itself.

Lighting fix for webcams

The Android app and video calling features are going to be made available in the next few days and the On Air improvements are to roll out over the next few weeks.