As we reported yesterday that Google has replaced the Gtalk or Google chat with a new feature rich Hangouts. The feature is still rolling out to users worldwide slowly, but if you dont want to wait for Google to push it to your Gmail account then you can use a small workaround to enable Google+ Hangouts on your account easily.

As Google Hangouts is new with loads of feature inbuilt, most users including me are getting confused about some of the basic features , as we are used to the simple Gtalk. One of the small confusion is, how to identify the online friends in the Hangouts application as most users are unable to find that options.

Thanks to Ashwin (who tipped us) that you can easily identify the Online people are friends from your contacts list in Hangouts. For everyone who is online, there is a small green bar shown below the profile picture of that contact.

Hangouts online

Using that green bar you can easily identify the online friends from the contacts.

How many of you have already switched to Hangouts? We would love to hear some feedback from everyone who is using it. Do share it with us using the comments below.