A little over 3 years ago, we all went remote due to the pandemic and work life changed dramatically overnight. One thing we found ourselves doing was a lot more shared, remote presentations. With this came the constant need to ask the person sharing the slides to go to the “Next slide please”. This repeated phrase was like nails on a chalkboard to me, so in October 2020 I released the Shared Slides Clicker extension to allow people to easily, remotely share control of a Google Slides presentation over Google Meet. No longer did people need to say “Next slide please”.
While I was proud of my solution, I knew that asking people to install a whole Chrome extension for this was not an ideal solution. I submitted feedback to Google to ask them to add this capability into Google Meet. I wanted them to make my extension obsolete. My extension even encouraged users to make the same request to Google.
Well after almost 3 years, Google is finally adding this capability to Google Meet. Coming soon, Google Meet will allow you to add in “co-presenters” when you are sharing a Google Slides presentation.
I’m surprised it took Google so long to add this functionality, but I’m very glad to see this feature being released. Their solution seems pretty good and it’s definitely more integrated than what I could do with a separate extension. I’m a little worried that you can’t set up co-presenters ahead of time, so it will cause some friction at the start of meetings. But that’s not the end of the world.
I will sigh a big sigh of relief when I can finally shut down the Shared Slides Clicker. Don’t get me wrong - it’s been fun and rewarding providing this service to the community. I learned a ton while building it and the extension has handled over 280,000 slide actions for over 6,000 users. But it’s also required a lot of work to maintain, upgrade and enhance the extension to meet users’ needs.
So thank you Google for (finally) listening and making my extension obsolete.