Have you ever received a Google Spaces invitation? I haven't. I've never received any private invitation to use the new Google Spaces app, not that I would have used the app for group chats or group works anyways, but the way the product director Luke Wroblewski explained Spaces just made the app sounded like a brilliant idea. He wrote on a blog post prior to the Google I/O annual developer event in 2016, “Sharing things typically involves hopping between apps to copy and paste links. Group conversations often don’t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can’t easily get back to when you need them."
‘Hopping’ is not a very pleasant experience
Spaces help people create a space to share links images, and posts.
For each space created, there will be a personal invitation link to share with other people, team members, family members, or other members in your groups. The app was first introduced in May, 2016, and is still available on Android, iOS and as a web app. In July, the Kifi team joined the Spaces team to develop the app further. Less than 3 months ago, Spaces just updated its users from a Google+ post thread that the app had extended the character count limits for spaces text thread to almost no limits on iOS and web or 4,000 characters on Android.
For every minute you are angry with someone, you lose 60 seconds of happiness that you never get back.
— Google Spaces Russia (@GoogleSpacesRu) August 7, 2014
Private invitations let you invite just the right people
For group messaging and sharing Spaces has a few other plus points.
The private invitation lets users select only the right people into a space. Google calls this feature “invite controls”. Another feature is the spaces themselves, which kind of reminds me of Google Collections, which was introduced in 2015 as a way to organize posts by a certain topic. Both of these features are a great addition to Spaces, but it would be quite difficult to get users to convert from the apps they are already using to share among themselves.
This is a challenge faced by every new messaging app out there.
The announcement could be viewed from Google Spaces help section from yesterday, and people are questioning the reasoning behind Google's move. Starting March 3, the spaces created with Spaces will remain read-only. Invitations can no longer be sent to new people or people who are already on Spaces.
Until then, people can still use Spaces to share links to their spaces, write posts, comment on them, and use the app on their gadgets. Everything in Spaces, including individual content and group shares that have been created, will be deleted on April 17. The app would have been a year old by then.
