“We wanted to build a better group sharing experience, so we made a new app called Spaces that lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic,” said Luke Wroblewski, product director, in a Google Statement.
Google has taken yet another step towards world domination with the introduction of Google Spaces. The problem which google tries to solve with this new app is to remove the pain of sharing information between apps. Imagine a scenario where you want to share links and YouTube videos about a particular topic. In this case the user has to go through multiple apps to search for links and videos or any related data. Then there is the burden of copying the links, which is a real pain in itself, and eventually sharing on either hangout or WhatsApp. What google does is it combines all these tiny aspects of a group sharing and combines it into one. It makes for a great user experience in terms of ease of sharing.
Spaces has inbuilt option of sharing either via google search links, YouTube videos, your photo gallery or plain and simple text. Users can create groups called “Spaces” and invite people to join them via Email, Social Media, or a Shareable Link to Join. It is introduced as a solution for “small group sharing”. Spaces is available on Android, iOS, desktop, and mobile web for all Gmail accounts. Having said this it still has mixed reviews among its users as it’s a very confusing move from Google.
Allo, Duo and now Spaces. What is the strategy behind launching so many apps when already Hangouts is a stable product? Would it make more sense to introduce these features in Hangouts itself? It is anyways not considered a logical thing to make user change his behaviour.
This feature set is more suitable for business or event based chats rather than friendly group chats as they tend to go off topic and loose the trend frequently. Slack is one player which does the job superbly and it will take a lot of effort to move on to Spaces.
How Spaces will play with the audience is to be seen but Google has to thread carefully to make a mark in this market. The company will be demonstrating the new service in-action at their I/O Developer Conference, at which time it will be clear how they wish to see this service being utilized by their users.