Hangouts

Hangouts enhances the social capabilities put at your disposal by Google+, the Google-owned social networking and identity service. With Google+ Hangouts you can send IMs to your friends, video chat with your friends, or send photos to your friends. To sum things up, I am going to say that Hangouts is a messenger and video chat application for Google+.

Hangouts is available as a browser extension for Google Chrome on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Hangouts is available as a mobile app for Android and iOS.
Hangouts is available for Chrome OS, the operating system designed to work primarily with web applications.

Say you have Google’s Chrome web browser on a Windows PC. To get started with Hangouts you must first install the Hangouts extension for Chrome. If you have a Google account but you did not join Google+, you must do so next. After that you can sign into your account, launch Hangouts, and communicate with all your friends.

From a functionality point of view, you can expect to get the following from Hangouts: instant messaging, make video calls, group conversations, call phone number, emoji emoticons, send photos, notifications for incoming messages and incoming phone calls, invite people, block people, share your status, set your mood, sign into Hangouts when Chrome starts, keep Hangouts on top of other windows, change profile picture, live-stream with Hangouts On Air.

Send instant messages, send photos, join group conversations, and initiate video calls – you can do all these with Hangouts for Google+.