Google Brings Voice Calling Back to Gmail, Now Under Hangouts

Gmail users who upgraded Google Talk to Hangouts back in May were up in arms after discovering that doing so removed the ability to make voice calls. Google addressed this issue on Tuesday after it finally introduced voice calls to Hangouts.

"For those of you who have taken the plunge and are using desktop Hangouts in Gmail, Google+ and the Chrome extension, we've heard loud and clear that you miss the ability to make calls from Gmail, so today, we're happy to announce it's back," Alex Wiesen, a senior software engineer, wrote in a blog post.

Citing new features such as adding multiple phone numbers and video participants to the same call, as well as playing sound effects with the Google Effect app, Wiesen said the newly dubbed "Hangouts calling" is "better than before." He added that calls to the U.S. and Canada are free from countries where Hangouts calling is available, while international rates are reasonably priced.

To make a call, users must click the phone icon in Gmail, and the "Call a phone" menu item inGoogle+ and the Chrome extension. Those who don't yet have Hangouts in Gmail — but want to try it — must click on their profile photo in the chat list, and select "Try the new Hangouts."

Making calls from Hangouts will roll out over the next few days.

Are you excited that voice calling is back in Gmail? Tell us in the comments, below.

[via The Verge]

Homepage image courtesy of Flickr, sneurgaonkar; other images courtesy of Google

Everything Gmail Knows About You and Your Friends, Visualized

BRIAN FUNG for National Journal   43 minutes ago

When Google hands over email records to the government, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and email addresses of senders and recipients in your account. The feds, in turn, can mine that information for patterns that might be useful in a law enforcement investigation.

What kind of relationships do they typically find? Thanks to the researchers at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, you can now find out. They've developed a tool called Immersion that taps into your Gmail and displays the results as an interactive graphic. (That's mine, above.)

The chart depicts all of your contacts as nodes, and the gray lines between those nodes represent connections between people by email. The larger the circle, the more prominent that person is in your digital life.

A word of warning for the privacy conscious: To use the service, you need to give MIT permission to analyze your email metadata. Once you've done so, it'll take a few minutes to compile everything. When you're done, you're given the option to delete your metadata from MIT's servers.

What you see in my chart are five and a half years' worth of emails. The yellow circles indicate family and close family friends. All of my college friends are in red, and my D.C. friends are in green. Blue nodes denote my colleagues at The Atlantic; pink, my coworkers at National Journal; and gray, people who generally don't share connections with the other major networks in my life.

In all, MIT counted 606 "collaborators" in my inbox, totaling some 83,000 emails. But you can also break down that data by year, month or even the past week. Pretty amazing stuff — and a good reminder not only how much information Google knows about you, but what that information can uncover about other people. If you can learn this much just from looking at one account, imagine what crunching hundreds or thousands of interconnected accounts must be like.

Image courtesy of MIT Media Lab

This article originally published at National Journal here