Apparently GChat was only a colloquial term for the product formerly known as Google Talk? I thought it was a separate thing from the Talk VoIP service.

Nah, it was official: http://web.archive.org/web/20171019144317/https://support.go...

The Wikipedia disambiguation page really clears up the mess that is Google's branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat

Good to know I'm not going crazy. Maybe being gaslighted by wikipedia editors but that's not out of the ordinary. The Wikipedia entry for Google Talk[1], says:

> Google Talk, also known as Google Chat,[1] was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication.[2] The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.[3]

What a mess.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk

I wish they would put a "Messaging Czar" in charge with completely authority, to fix that mess. They know their target is iMessage and WhatsApp, yet don't seem to coalesce around any product in particular.

Are they too scared of regulators to make an iMessage-like service in Android? RCS will barely nibble at the ground they need to cover in order to compete for real.

Even the disambiguation page is missing Google Buzz which existed for a brief time somewhere in there.

Google Buzz was a social network, not a video service.

Google chat = Google Hangouts Chat. They rebranded it 10 days ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21215588/google-chat-hango...

It is effectively a slack or teams competitor.

Classic Hangouts is/was a lot of things. Sadly it was too many things. The new Chat has very similar Gmail integration, so if they ever get it out to consumer, it hopefully won't be a big change for people.

Hangouts has come a long way... it started out as a 'drop-in group video' feature for Google+. The idea being you could "hangout" with your friends by just starting a room and then anyone who saw it could join you. Basically Houseparty.