Adding people to group messages in Hangouts just got easier with shareable links

Google’s Hangouts has had group messaging for years, but it’s always been hard than it needed to be – especially if the people you wanted to add weren’t in your contacts list. In an effort to fix that, the Hangouts team has added a new “Join by link” option which allows user to generate a unique link for a specific group chat and send it out to as many people they like via email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter or any other messaging platform they can think of. This is extremely helpful if you want to create a group message for a few dozen people or if you want to move a group message from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp over to Hangouts.

Hangouts also allows you to kill the unique link if it happens to get into the wrong hands. The feature is rolling out now for all platforms, but it’ll likely be a few days before everyone sees the new “Join by link” option show up. 

By adding video messaging to Hangouts on Android and making it easier to add people to group messaging, it seems Google isn’t quite ready to give up on Hangouts. Do you think Hangouts will continue to get few features once Allo and Duo are made available to the public?