Hector Martin

@kathampy In the early days of Hangouts, it used to work sans Plus if you visited the URL to start a video chat. But they locked that down.

@kathampy I can guarantee that multi-user video chats (Hangouts) required G+ at one point, not sure when that was reverted.

@kathampy Yes, AFAIK that was always supported under the "Google Talk" brand if you hadn't upgraded to Hangouts. But now multi-user works.

@kathampy Sure, I never tried that, but it's functionally equivalent to Talk. The "new" feature was multi-user mode which was tied to G+.

@kathampy You could use GTalk without a GMail account too, even via XMPP; you got a funny JID assigned and required a protocol extension.

@kathampy IIRC Hangouts<->Talk interop always (mostly) worked for single-user chat incl. Android; it was multi-user chatrooms that broke.