It’s 2013, so why are you still using Skype? Google has matched and/or exceeded all the features of Skype and other chat services, for the price of free.  It’s proven so open and fully featured Obama used it for his planned virtual interaction with the public. Lauded as Google Plus’ killer application, Google Plus Hangouts should be the application you use to hold online meetings, for whatever reason.
These are the reasons Google Hangouts is great:

1. Free video chat. What was once a premium, prohibitively expensive service, is now absolutely free and painless to use. Furthermore, there are no operating system holdouts as the software needed to run Google Hangouts is available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
2. Video chat is combined with audio and text chat. In Google Hangouts, participants can do any combination of audio, text and video chatting. This is especially helpful whenever you get a bandwidth hiccup and video cuts out, and it’s an edge over competitors, which forces separate interfaces for video and text chat.
3. Screenshare. And you can do more than just share a single screen, Hangouts will recognize and let you choose to share one of multiple displays. Hangouts extends the capabilities of Screenshare and makes it fun, allowing you to search for and watch YouTube videos together as well as an amazing SFX app. Using facial recognition technology, Hangouts recognizes what location your face is at all times, and allows you to put on virtual hats, beards, glasses, etc that other people in the Hangout see.
4. Integration with other Google Services. Each integration optimizes the use of each service and really highlights the benefits of Google unifying your accounts for their different services across the board. Let us look at each Service in turn:

1. Gmail contacts can be added into Hangouts. You can invite people to join you by email as well. Google will prompt those people to joing Google Plus and then download the Hangouts app, of course.
2. Google Docs already allows people to collaborate on documents simultaneously. With Google Hangouts, in between screensharing and video and audio chat, collaboration can technically be more tight knit than is possible in real life.
3. Youtube integration is optimized so that pretty much every use Google can take out of YouTube has been utilized.
   • First, off livestreams appear on YouTube. In fact, when you schedule Google Hangouts (like for a weekly vidcast, for example), YouTube links and urls are generated for those future events. Aside from the chat that occurs among the people in the Hangout, everyone watching the video in YouTube can comment via YouTube.
   • After that livestream, the accompanying videos can be accordingly recorded and uploaded to YouTube. On the side, this is how I often end up catching a few favorite vidcasts, since livestreams will ocassionally suffer from lag.
4. aside from YouTube, Hangouts can also be scheduled in Google Calendar. If you are using Calendar as an app in your workspace, this can be set up in such a way that it automatically notifies coworkers and adds the date to their schedules.
5. Lastly, Google Hangouts come up as Google Plus activity. You can invite other people to join your Hangout, and the Hangout appears as activity while it is ongoing and when it is done. Depending on the privacy settings for your G+ account and the Hangout, people can join in on the Hangout as soon as they can see you have started one. You can actually react to any post on Google Plus by starting a Hangout for it, and just outsourcing people who would want to talk to you on the topic at hand.

There are downsides to using Google Hangouts, mainly

1. There is a privacy compromise to using Hangouts. Joining one will also require joining Google Plus, and that irrevocably means connecting your Gmail to it. There is still some level of control on the interaction in YouTube, Calendar and others, but Google will conceivably insist on unified single indentity accounts from everyone eventually. All new Gmail accounts automatically sign people up under the terms of the unified account. To put it finely, if you don’t like the idea of a single corporation having unprecedented access to your information, either make a new account just for Hangouts or just don’t use Hangouts.
2. There is a limit of seven to eight people in a Hangout. This will be sufficient for most people, and you can extend that interaction to a degree using Youtube, but for bigger corporate uses, they will need more than the free Google Hangouts app. Note that you do not necessarily have to go to competitors, as Google has a Business version of the app that should extend that functionality for people who will pay for it.

Finally, even if you’re not interested in Google Hangouts, here are a few strikes against using its biggest competitor, Skype:

1. Skype is still charging you for the same services Hangouts is now offering for free. This is not only disadvantageous to Skype’s install base, it’s borderline outrageous.
2. Whereas Google is upfront about collecting your data, Microsoft might be intruding on your privacy using Skype. What makes this worse is Microsoft refuses to tell the public, even after a public inquiry. Until the government compels Microsoft to answer these allegations, your privacy should be considered highly suspect when using Skype.

Skype is in fact, not as good at its job as Google Hangouts is, and still drops calls abruptly. Cordoning off features under paid packages works against them doubly now, since Google offers workarounds to dropped calls, that Skype might charge you for, for free.
Of course, Skype will still have a loyal userbase for a while, since many businesses have already invested with them, and Skype is not the only player in the market either, with Citrix’s GoToWebinar also being a prominent alternative. If you’re not doing webinars or online meetings now because you found either of those services cost prohibitive, however, now you have the best alternative you can possibly imagine.