Implications of "all hangouts are permalinks"

[yourcelf]

As of a couple of weeks ago, all regular Google hangouts are now permalinks -- the urls don't expire, and presumably the "This party is over" party of the past is now over.

Some implications of this change for us:

• we could now eliminate expiration of hangout URLs on sessions. Sessions and hangout URLs can have a permanent 1-to-1 relationship, both for event sessions and permalinks. The complex algorithm here for setting up a session could now be dramatically simplified.
• the permalink service is suddenly no longer such a big deal -- and could be simplified to just be basically a URL alias. We don't need to run the app in permalink sessions anymore, as we never need to report the session's URL back or expire the URL when everyone leaves.
• if nothing else, we might want to tone down the polemic in permalink-intro, as the assertion that "Hangout just doesn't behave like a first class citizen of the web because its URLs are unreliable" is no longer true.