Not even remotely. But at the time it seemed the better option. Migrating everyone from the walled gardens of AOL instant messenger and MSN messenger. To something a bit more open and at the time we wrongly thought more stable. The original G+ chat was their own xmpp server. And for a while was fully interoperable with other xmpp servers. But easier to convince people to go to "Google” than some other weird domain name. Then Google closed it off. Which sucked, but as long as they would be less restrictive about what platform and how you interfaced with it. Everything would still be okay. Right, right? Then they shut down Google Plus. And the roller coaster started. It got rolled out his chat. Then became Hangouts for the first time. At some point it became allo. And eventually went back to Hangouts again before they killed it off yet again.

The only way anyone could or should use it again. Is if they implement just a straight up XMPP server tied in to Gmail. And leave it interoperable with all other XMPP servers. As part of Gmail, it might actually stand some permanence. So long as we all don’t remember inbox.