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Add a new account in Pidgin (or change your existing XMPP account) to 'Hangouts' in the dropdown box. The first time you connect your web browser should automatically open and ask you to authenticate with Google. It will then provide you a code that you need to copy-paste into the popup.
See the Bitlbee FAQ for more details
That means it worked. Make sure you follow the instructions in the YouTube video to get the oauth cookie from the web inspector.
Open up https://hangouts.google.com/ and go to the settings screen and turn on "Show when you were last seen online"
You'll need to search for them. From the buddy list, go to Accounts->{Your Hangouts Account}->Search for friends... then type in their email address or name or whatever
Right click the buddy in the buddy list and choose "Initiate Chat". After that you can invite more people to the group chat with Conversation->Invite...
The buddy list is made up of a combination of your most recent conversations and your Google contacts list. Deleting a buddy from the buddy list should archive the conversation, while deleting a group chat should make you leave it. You can also leave a group chat with the /leave command
If you set your status to Away, Hangouts won't think you're active so you'll get notified about received messages on other devices. Setting your status to "Do Not Disturb" is set across all of your devices, so no devices will get notified about any new messages.
What we get from the server is two flags: Available and Reachable. ("Available" is the solid green circle you see on the Hangouts webapp.) We use these two flags to set the status in Pidgin:
- Available and Reachable? - Online
- Reachable but not Available? - Away
- Available but not Reachable? - Extended Away
- Neither Available nor Reachable? - Offline/Invisible
If someone sends you a webpage link, if they're not on a Google-owned domain, they would normally display as one URL but when you click it would go to a google.com/url webpage instead to be redirected. If you don't like the URL intercept page you can enable this setting to avoid that behaviour
To connect to the Hangouts api's we need to have 'uberauth' permissions. To get that we have to pretend to be a platform that supports the Hangouts app, which is limited to iOS, Android and Chrome. The Android and Chrome apps both use Google authentication bundled into the platform, which means we can't do an OAuth login, only leaving iOS which can login via the browser.