I don't really understand what's going on here, besides Google throwing out another sharing / community / messaging / threading / picturey thing when they already have tools that do all of this which could use some love, not further confusion or dis-assembly.
That Spaces allows participants who aren't using a Google account is … interesting, or even attractive, but until I actually try this thing out with some people, I would rather see them improve and make easier what they have, rather than (e.g.) break off bits and pieces of Google+ (which does, or did, much of what Spaces seems to provide) and put us in a several-month beta that still does't have all the features transferred over.
Originally shared by +Luke Wroblewski:
Introducing Spaces
Today we're launching a new tool for group sharing that aims to tackle many of the pain points we've seen repeatedly:
* getting people together is hard
* jumping between apps to share things is slow
* conversations often go off-topic
* finding what was shared before is painfulWe wanted to build a better group sharing experience that addresses these issues and more, so we made a new app called Spaces. More in the official Google blog post: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/05/introducing-spaces-tool-for-small-group.html
Top comment:
Text me in Messenger to let me know about the discussion of this in Hangouts so I can share about it on Google+ and then post the results to Spaces.
Pretty much sums it up.
Also: not seeing how this is different than Communities on Google+.
This sounds similar to their old Wave concept, which for my money was an amazing medium for running online games.
Having just tried it, there are a few differences between communities and spaces.
Search in communities is geared more around text, while spaces search seems more geared toward finding media – links, photos, whatever. Communities is therefore where you go to say something, spaces are where you go to share something.
Spaces feel like they're intended for more private, personal, ad-hoc use than communities. I don't expect you'll see a "find a space for you" type feature. Instead, you'll have spaces for people in your social groups, created to talk about some specific topic or just vague bullshitting.
Right now there's three shareable types: photos, links, and text. You can comment on all three. Communities is slightly more mature in this regard, with separate support for video sharing and other specialized things. Spaces still figures out how to present a Youtube video, there's just no affordance for actions like 'search for a youtube video by name'.
I think they are coming for Slack.
If that's the case, they have a long way to go. Slack is a pretty amazing sharing tool and I've been very impressed with it. Google still provides a few things Slack effectively can't (single sign-on across a variety of services you use today, for example), and could probably compete on price (Slack isn't cheap if you use any of its better features), but I think they lack the internal motivation to really do a proper Slack clone.
+Bill Garrett Not seeing a compelling reason to try it yet, but I'll keep my eyes open.
Yeah, I don't have an immediate use either. I know what I WOULD use it for, I'm just not doing that thing right now. 🙂
+Bill Garrett I use Slack, a lot.
This worries me because just from the scale difference, Google can easily kill Slack without giving us a good replacement
Poking around in Spaces, I was disappointed to see it doesn't support even the rudimentary markdown that google+ manages.
It's not for me right now. Maybe sometime.
That's the funny thing. It's not even technically hard to do something like Slack. I could do it. It'd be very hard to make a polished version of it, and harder still to do something like Slack that does the one thing Google brings to the table: the ability to plug into the rest of the Google ecosystem.
Frustratingly, their API is all out there and pretty well documented. You can't do everything, but it would be possible to write a third party tool that does some integration – cooperative editing in docs, sharing from drive or photos, uploads that get stored to drive, whatever.
I use Slack personally and Hipchat professionally, and Hipchat's integration with Jira, Bamboo, and other dev tools is awesome. I don't have quite the free time to do something like this without a guaranteed audience and plenty of help, but it could be done. So I'm confused by Google engineers – the guys who gave us stuff like Gmail itself, Camlistore, and Wave – haven't done it.
I've messed around with Slack off and on, but none of my professional teams use it – I'm usually the tech guy in a given work group – and I don't hate google+ communities enough (yet) to replace it with Slack teams.
I've got a writing group in Communities that would probably port to Slack painlessly (the sharing of google drive documents for commenting works well enough in Slack), but even then, we're still using Hangouts for the weekly workshop meeting, so … replacing that, we're either on something like Skype (dislike) or paying for Slack (why, when Hangouts is right there), and in both cases, losing video and desktop sharing and blah blah blah.
The main thing I use Communities for – organizing gaming stuff – still ultimately makes use of a google product – hangouts for the actual gaming (or roll20, but it's not like Slack plugs into that. :P)
It's so annoying that all of this worked better 18 months ago than it does now. Calendars were easier. Scheduled events were easier. Photo sets were easier. Googleheads will tell you 'all the features of google+ photos is now in the stand-alone app, plus more!' but I don't want that stuff stand-alone: integration with the thing I was already in was the value-add.
+Doyce Testerman I will note that one thing we are not making use of that would allow an easier porting to something like (I guess) Slack is persistent Hangout URLs. So for the Chipper, there's no reason for every session to be a brand new Hangout that I know of. There's an actual link that can be saved and reused and reentered; it's just not the default in Events (the other quasi-missing piece here). So as long as Slack (or whatever) has a place where you could hang that Hangout link, that would work for either the Chipper or the SW thing.
Just a thought that's been rummaging around in my head. I actually (obviously) still like Google+ and its Communities a lot. But there are ways to straddle both worlds without breaking stuff.
I like the communities also. Quite a bit. I get frustrated with the way things get progressively more complicated as time goes on.
You're right, and I'd forgotten about the persistent Hangout links. Would certainly work with the Woodchipper (and it's easy enough in the community to add a link to one and keep using it). We should do that. Also, not for nothing – makes it easier to port if and/or when communities ever becomes too much of a pain to deal with.
With the Rebels game, the 'on air' nature of it means a new one every time is more useful, since the recording inherits the name of the hangout.
The only thought on the permalink Hangouts is, I think, everyone gets a ringy-dingy on their devices when it gets started backup, whereas the ad hoc ones via Events let you just enter. It would potentially solve Barrett's issue, though.
I think it's work at least giving it a try (as you've seen).
The new thing is facebooky apps for a clique. A circle of your actual friends. People you could actually see on a regular basis.
See, there's a new startup and all the app does is arrange lunch amongst friends. Sounds stupid but they made a fortune. This just happened.
That's what they're going after.