Hangouts’ presence on Gmail was a bit strange from the start; Although it should replace Gtalk, some of its functions were lost along the way and its design did not convince many, to the point that many people still use the old version as GTalk. Today Google has introduced a new update that aims to solve some of these problems.
Easier and more intuitive
Among them is the difficulty of finding users and knowing their status. At first we can only know if a friend was connected or not depending on whether their avatar was a little more blurred, although for a while a green bar indicates it better. Now we have a new magnifying glass icon in which we can get a list of contacts in a popup menu, and a green circle will indicate if they are connected.
From this same menu we can search for new users to start a conversation and mark the ones we want to receive the message, in a way very similar to the Google+ post. Finally, from here too We can define our mood with 80 different emojis.
The new version will be appearing to all Hangouts users in Gmail today.
Source | GMail on Google+