There have been many dark spots in Google's history. From the memorable ones – the Google Reader news reading service, which was closed in 2013 and the Google Buzz microblogging service, which was phased out in 2011. From the things that did not excite the public so much – Google Health, Google Talk, Google Notebook, Google Labs and lesser known projects: Picnik , Knol, Aardvark and so on. The darkest spot in this story was, perhaps, the shutdown of the Google Wave service, mainly because the company managed to make a lot of noise during its launch. The projects listed above are what Google officially closed, that is, it curtailed development, support and simply 'killed' the entire services. Do not forget that now the corporation has a lot of “hangs” – services that seem to be supported, are active and people use them. However, at the same time, everyone understands that development has reached a dead end, the service has not become as popular as expected, and its time will soon come. A good example is Google+. Obviously, the company failed to nurture a real competitor for Facebook and now maintains its social network for image, prestige, or even I don't know why. Sooner or later, Google+ will be closed, as well as other not very successful projects. Today I want to tell you about another strange and slightly useless service from Google, it was recently born, but already raises questions and sincere surprise – Google Spaces.
What is Google Spaces? This is a service for communication in groups, in short. The company itself gives as examples of using Spaces such scenarios: a working group where colleagues discuss some issues, a vacation group where family members are arguing about where and how to relax, and so on, and so on.
It works like this: install Spaces (the program is tied to a Google account), you see a white field where you can create themes. A topic, also known as a group, is a separate screen within which you can generate text cards, cards with attached files, with a picture or with the results of a search query from google.com. The idea is that each card within a topic is a separate place where all participants can leave comments. That is, inside the topic you create a card with some content and already under this content you are discussing with other people. Each topic member can create cards with any content and leave comments. As a result, you should get a service where in different topics you discuss various useful things with other people. This is in theory.
In practice, it turns out that using Spaces is corny inconvenient, because the service does not know how to do anything at all, except for the things described above. In fact, Spaces is a kind of mixture of the capabilities of a modern messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) with its groups and task management services, where projects are created, people are added and discussions are held. However, in Spaces, everything is done at an initial level, both what is taken from instant messengers and what is taken from task management services.
I'll take two simple examples: a good messenger (Telegram) and a good task management service (Trello).
In Telegram, you can create a group, send people there and discuss anything. At the same time, you can add links, pictures, videos and any other content to the group, mark any group member with the '@' tag so that he can see messages addressed specifically to him, set up sound notifications for different groups, and so on. In Spaces, inside the card, you can add a picture, a photo from a smartphone camera, a sticker or a search result, that's all. No files, no mentions to specific users, no alerts, no tools to view content added to a card (except for word searches).
In Trello, we create 'teams' and inside them boards, on each board you can sculpt as many cards as you like with any content: text, pictures, files, etc. You can comment on each card, add labels to it, change the color, set the time of action, open or close access to it for specific users, and so on. In Trello, you can specify who and how to use the cards (permissions). That is, it is a powerful tool for working with a team, a group of people on some project or on some topic. As you can imagine, in Spaces there is only the very presence of cards inside topics and the ability to comment on them. All.
The result is a completely useless service with a minimum set of features. In addition, Spaces simply does not help a new user to get comfortable and understand even this small 'functionality'. You launch the application and you see a blank white screen with a couple of buttons. What to do here? What for? Why? Unclear.
However, it is not clear how long Google Spaces will last.