Create Google Hangouts quickly with these easy URLs

If you are like me you spend a lot of time in Google Hangouts either for your podcasts or for a quick video conversation with someone. Google doesn’t make it easy to generate a hangout and then provide you with a sharable URL to someone. Digging around online I found two URLs that I’ll keep bookmarked:

Standard Google Hangout URL

http://hangouts.google.com/start

This will create a standard Google Hangout that you can invite your friends to. It won’t make a new browser window that has the address bar hidden or anything like that. I’ve seen other solutions that pop-up a new window that have the address bar and navigation bars removed, this doesn’t help me when I want to grab the URL and share it with a friend over Facebook or IM. When doing this it will also create an empty hangout if you hit “cancel”; for those of you who want to play around with it or invite by URL instead of invite by google account name.

Google Hangout On Air

http://hangouts.google.com/onair

This is a convenience URL to start a Google Hangouts On Air, from here you can copy the URL and share it with your friends. This hangout can be recorded to the YouTube account that is associated with the google account you are currently logged in as.

Accessing Google Hangouts directly

https://hangouts.google.com/ takes you right to the Google Hangouts area of the site.

Specifying which Google account to use? Nope.

The easiest way to do this is to use Chrome and have multiple profiles set-up for each of your accounts. We’ve found that by doing this along with using the Google+ account switcher (avatar in upper right) you can somewhat specify which account to load the urls above with. It’s unfortunate that you can’t specify the account in the URL by passing a variable.