Reader derangement syndrome strikes again. Summarizing the thread, if you're are an early adopter of anything, you run the risk it won't be here in a year. That's what we tolerate in the tech arena, start ups throwing lots of good and dumb ideas at the wall to see what sticks, evolution in action. How many people who built their business on Facebook's F8 platform went belly up due to changes?

Google is a company that is constantly experimenting with new products and services. Yes, some of them will fail. That's the cost of innovation. It's really sad we've forgotten that. Failure is an acceptable risk to move forward. If you're risk averse, leave the opportunity to others to jump in and place their bets if Helpouts is a winning platform for them.

This would help with the times I've just wanted to ask someone "so, does this shirt actually go with these pants, or am I totally crazy?"

All joking aside, this could be interesting. It makes me think of that service that existed for a while where you could ask a question of a topic area, and it would send an IM to people and ask them to answer it. I forget what it was called, but I used it for a little while.

The payment/HIPAA compliance aspect are pretty interesting, too. I would easily throw $50 at a 10 minute consult with a doctor instead of having to make an appointment and haul myself in to the local clinic. Particularly if said doctor could then fax a prescription for something completely boring but still not OTC to my local pharmacy.

An interesting new avenue for Google, where the results and satisfaction are entirely subjective, according to perception of the customer.

With search results or Gmail they can hand-wave away dis-satisfaction my saying the 99th percentile are happy, but this is one-on-one. I can see the Money Back Guarantee being quite a support burden.

But why are Google doing this? It's not really "organizing the World's information" because it keeps knowledge compartmentalised in the 'experts'.

>Today, we’re announcing Helpouts—a new way to get and give help over live video.

I'm confused, hasn't this existed for months? Here is an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771

Am I the only one that doesn't understand all the google hate? (about discontinuing a few of their products)

This could be a great way to monetize skills.

Youtube channel with tutorials, how-to's etc. to build up your credibility.

Google Helpouts to help people directly when they want to go beyond the tutorials or get that little extra.

Remarkably similar to sites like https://clarity.fm/home and https://www.popexpert.com/

This feels like "online tutoring to me". And as far as tutoring goes, I feel like most of the time it's better to automate it. Like using treehouse instead of getting a programming tutor.

I could see some situations where it'd be useful though.

- If you have a quick question and are really frustrated and are willing to pay.

- Sometimes you care a lot or have a lot of money, and are willing to get a tutor.

- Some things (like doctor appointments) might be better served online than in person.

For anyone interested in a tech specific version of this there is a site http://anyfu.com/ (I'm a fan but not associated).

I believe this model for connecting people for very brief engagements over the internet is an interesting one. With the educational model being pushed by companies like Coursera I could see something like this becoming popular for access to tutors or even peers studying the same subject. For quick help solving a problem there is obviously a problem of getting to sufficient scale in a 2-sided market place. Perhaps google will achieve that. I suppose the risk is becoming the yahoo answers or the expersexchange of the space.

My initial reaction is "cool, but I won't use it as it'll be shutdown soon enough". I wonder if enough people avoid new Google products due to shutdown fears so it leads to a product ultimately being shutdown due to neglect.

A bit of a vicious cycle.

The idea of a marketplace for experts is intriguing. I can't imagine this will ever work well, though.

- Google is presently curating this list, approving everyone who would be a provider. This is fine for launch, but this obviously needs to scale.

- From a functional standpoint, this is the Human App Store. How do I, the provider, promote myself among thousands of search results for underwater-basket-weaving experts?

- Race to the bottom: I don't associate Google with any sort of premium pricing model. If I think my services are worth more than the low-cost providers, but I'm one of a thousand providers, am I going to have to go the only other route Google tends to provide -- paid advertising placement?

The idea is interesting, but I don't think Google will ever position it to be helpful to anyone but users and themselves.

So this is a solution to the "problem" of people looking up how to do something on youtube, now you can ask an expert and get detailed two-way feedback.

Looks good but just not something that fits Google's DNA. A smaller & hungrier startup could have been a better place for this kind of marketplace

It's interesting that Google seems to be moving into the freelance space. I wonder if they're going to stay in the limited fashion, or expand to go after Odesk etc.

Personally I really love this idea, but isn't anyone else seriously concerned that Google is taking over the whole `World's Information Economy`?

I think BuyOuts should be regulated, this could help the whole industry and econmy. Google should probably be fined with multi billion penalties for using their monopoly power.

     • ISP's with Google Fiber
     • PayPal and Banking Industry → Google Wallet + Google Checkout
     • Automobile Industry → Google Car
     • TelCo's → Android+Nexus (a google plan soon?)
     • Small Businesses in "successfull niche sectors" → BuyOuts
     • RIAA, Music and Video Industry → Google Play
     • Energy Industry → "Energy startup" BuyOuts
     • Spy Agencies → =sumOf(Google Products)
     • …And even more that I've not listed, or that is to come…

-- IMHO: (Services stealing the market of businesses, who lost their job or company should be paid their loss. Services not focusing on their main product should be forced to get closed, or get opened up to the public. I know this is very harsh and I don't think that all of this is necessary or should really be done, but someone has to stop Google from acting so dominantly and strategically. They're aiming for world leadership, nothing less and are killing every enemy sector, one by one. This is not a paranoid act of me to boycott Google. I use their services every day. But I don't want them to kill every other sector, just because they're not innovating as fast as Google can (by forcing innovators to a BuyOut with millon/billion dollor offers).)

Shameless plug, but if you want to try out a Helpout, or learn a little Android development, you can check out my listing here:

https://helpouts.google.com/114052868601022948953/ls/a65184a...

I wonder if there's something in this that could be used to provide extra income to open source contributors.

I'd be interested to see GitHub experiment with providing their own service like this for the open source projects it hosts.

A project could designate certain contributors as experts and say you're having a problem with that project, you could talk with an expert via GitHub, for a per-minute fee, with an optional minimum of 15 minutes (for example).

I'd guess it'd be more likely to succeed by being right there integrated in GitHub's UI, rather than shoehorning just a link to Google Helpouts or another service into a project's README.

At this point I don't even know what will convince me that stuff like this that Google releases isn't yet another dead-in-a-year product. We've seen a number of great service being killed just in the past few months alone. What makes this any different?

My only advice to kids is: don't make this something you depend on. Remember if you aren't paying for it, you're the product, and Google could care less about you and your silly needs when it comes time for some Spring Cleaning™.

The comments here show an interesting legacy that Google is developing. The lack of durability in its products.

I think the helpout concept is great, although only a small step up from the fact that for many things there is a youtube video it seems explaining how to do something. But it could be killer in education, specifically is MOOCs are the new college, what is the new TA? This could work there.

I signed up in the beta, mainly to learn how Google is approaching this. Observations:

+ High degree of curation and investment in quality + High investment of people to achieve the above

For example, I did a live video interview with a knowledgeable Google rep and she had several recommendations. About a week later, my submission was reviewed again, with even more (good) recommendations.

Anybody looked at the pricing of some of the services offered - e.g. end user:

help with your printer - $45 per help - $2 per minute (guess that will always be more than the printer was actually retailing for)

General computer help $10 (per incident) $2 per minute

maybe contact your printer / computer support team first - many today have online / real-time chat features now for free.

Interesting product. As others have pointed out, there are a number of similar services, many of them vertically-focused.

Google says it's starting small, but Helpouts is already quite broad. Covering lots of subjects won't be such a problem if Google leverages search and YouTube to promote relevant providers, but I'm not sure it will.

Can someone explain to me what's the difference between this and a skype/FaceTime session? Because I am confused.

My take on this is that Google is using Helpouts to figure out - what are the queries people cannot use Google for.

It's almost as if Google answers has been somewhat resurrected. Definitely keeping an eye on this.

wonder if this will get integrated into google search results as a way to help users with subjective questions not well addressed by google search ... e.g., search for "best way to bake a cake" and see as an option the ability to chat with an expert live.

Google's biggest enemy will continue to be themselves. If they are unable to promote and market this save for a few blog postings (as is their want to so often do) then it will die on the vine...just like so many other projects of theirs they can.

I wonder if this uses WebRTC. Or regardless maybe I should make a clone using WebRTC.

Makes perfect sense to piggyback on the success of DIY/how-to guides on YouTube, but that said, I have idea whether it's going to catch on.

Clearly Google should try this out either way.

So what technologies is this using for streaming etc..

Skype used to have something like this in 2006-ish...

The only way I would consider using this service is if Google started advertising paid support of their own products on it.

Feels less Odesk, more Clarity.fm to me

interesting, we'll see if consumers pick this up. I personally just think it is somehow another way to funnel people into G+.

Sidenote: 71 indexed pages site:helpouts.google.com thusfar.

This is obviously a Google's version of Mechanical Turk

Is this some way of popularizing hangouts?

Congratulations Google, you just re-invented IRC.

My kneejerk reaction is to wonder when this will go the way of Google Wave and Google Reader.