Google made a series of announcements this morning, most notably opening up its Google+ social product to everyone as its 100th feature. Not content to stop there, Google followed up with Google+ features 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107… 107 being a name change for its Google+ Group Messaging app Huddle.
When Google announced the Huddle product back in July, enterprise collaboration software startup Huddle — which has its own group messaging element — was like, “What gives?” and had their people contact Google’s people. Says Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin, “We let them know that we held the [Huddle] global trademark across all countries, so it was pretty clear that they had to consider renaming.”
McLoughlin tells me that Google was cool about the name change and that the dispute never entered arbitration. Google was just like ” We think we should find a better name for this product,” he tells me.
The Google+ Group Messaging feature is now known as, drumroll please, Messenger. Uh guys … Guys …
So while I can’t wait until the Facebook Messenger (or Yahoo Messenger, or Microsoft Messenger …) team gets a load of this, McLoughlin, for one, is pretty pleased with Google’s decision, “We’re just very happy that an amicable end was reached that didn’t conflict on our trademark.”
When asked if he had used Google+ Messenger himself, McLoughlin complimented Google on its look and feel but admitted app fatigue, “There are so many group messaging tools right now, it’s sort of hard to distinguish one from another.”
No kidding (For the record, I would have gone with ‘Skype’).
