Google Hangouts now has its own website

Google has given Hangouts a brand new home on the web. As of today, the messaging and video chat service is no longer buried inside of Google+ and Gmail: you can now just head to hangouts.google.com to start talking. The site puts Hangouts' three key features — instant messaging, voice calls, and video chats — front and center, with big buttons to start up each of them. It's definitely going to be a much easier way to use the service for people who aren't always inside of Gmail.

Hangouts has been getting a lot of attention from Google over the past couple months. The Hangouts app has been overhauled on both iOS and Android, bringing it up to date with Google's Material Design style and making the service a bit easier to use.

This is perhaps an obvious service for Google to put some work into. There's already a huge base of people with Google accounts who are able to use Hangouts; by giving the app a modern design and a broken out web service — much like Facebook has done with Messenger — Google is starting to make Hangouts into something that only a casual Google user may be able to start using.