Spaces, a tool for small group sharing
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
Not to sound so dismissive, (I hate to be critical for someone's hard work) but is that all that this new product is? Basically another (centralized) social network?
I think Google should instead develop an open source, federated protocol for maybe standardizing sharing via decentralized social networks. This would open it up to myriad apps/clients. Oh sure, there are some out there...but having it (the protocol) associated to Google would give it some authority - and by extension attract more devs to its ecosystem; though still keep it open/free. Side benefit, if Google sponsored and supported this federated protocol, they can begin to dive into the decentralized (dare i call it) movement. They could then position themselves to provide search (their original strength) across decentralized nodes, etc. Owners of their own decentralized nodes could choose to "play with Google" or not.
Who knows, maybe Google developing a federated protocol may not be ideal...but anything seems better than what this new product appears to be. (Seriously trying not to judge too soon though. ;-)
Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. Moxie's latest blog on Open Whisper Systems goes just as much for Google and carries even more weight there.
So they just keep throwing darts at the (centralized) social network space and hope that something will stick eventually. It wasn't a website yesterday, it might be an app today, maybe it'll be a VR/AR environment tomorrow.
I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures.
Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-...
pertaining to google wave specifically, by joining the federation there is still a heiarchy of how connections are made.
If you join a federation for google wave all of your messages still go through the top tier of that federation, to my knowledge this was by design (obviously this is all deprecated) if my statement is incorrect please let me know, but I see federated and decentralized as have some similarities but at the core are different solutions.
I am referring to this message [0] from Apache Wave mailing list in regards to how the Wave federation was designed, I took it as face value but do not know how to verify for accuracy.... above my head.
[0] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave-dev/...
wrong link earlier...woops
I think that's the scenario the parent was thinking of. But, as you said, Google is still going for replacing Facebook. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out...
I keep a close eye on Apache wave but the movement needs some new vitality, I see it hanging on a small handful of courageous and incredible volunteers albeit, needs more devs.
While I don't recall Wave being specifically designed for social network, I did used to think how innovative it was for its time as a platform for many types of communication and interaction paradigms. Further, there is even an open source social network platform based on it, namely Kune:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kune_(software)#Technical_deta...
And, of course: http://kune.cc
Definitely, very cool!
http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/05/16/google-just-launched...
I'm more than slightly burnt on Google, but I see a few items of promise here.
G+'s original organising conceit was Circles. These have all but disappeared in latest iterations of G+, as the complaints of critics from the first days of G+ have pretty much born out: Circles organise people but not content, they're unidirectional, those you have circled don't know where they are put. A very frequent statement early in G+, from all sorts, was "you're using Circles wrong". Which, quite frankly, should have been a massive indication of a fundamental architectural error.
Google have insisted on maintaining the regardless.
Another early observation was that G+ lacked a construct of warrens vs. plazas. There were specific areas that small groups could discuss items, but far less so for large discussions. Most of which quickly became utterly untenable.
Instead, what emerged are what I've termed "salons" -- specific hosts (Google's on Yonatan Zunger is among the better) who would come up with and foster intelligent discussion. This does mean hauling out the trash and active moderation, but when it works, it works well.
"Spaces" suggests that the new model has an intrinsic concept of, well, social space, an understanding Google have proven highly resistant to understanding. In particular, a social space is define by what it includes and excludes.
Among the spectacular failures of G+ were its immensely misguided and ill-fated mergers with Gmail (no, random asshats from public fora shouldn't populate my email autocomplete entries), and YouTube (no, my work and family contacts shouldn't know what my video watching habits are, nor do my G+ comments belong in YouTube space nor vice versa).
Google took loads of criticism for this, much from me. I have little hope of the lessons actually sticking, but I'm open to the possibility.
My concern with Spaces is that it will prove too structured, rigid, and fragmented. If it's aping another service, that would be Reddit, and it's helpful to remember that Reddit emerged as a single forum, splitting off into multiples only with time. Today, the challenge on Reddit is finding the appropriate middle ground -- a warren large enough that there's an actual conversation, but not a plaza so large that it precludes any structure from emerging.
I'd also very much like to see an open source, federated protocol, and have suggested as much myself. https://redd.it/1t21cj
I think it is similar with circles: It doesn't make all that much sense for me to list someone as a "close friend" and they to have me in their "random co-worker" group. With network effects (people who are actual friends, talk together and show people stuff in the real world) - there's no way to really keep stuff that's shared with group A secret from group B - it might not give a false sense of security (hopefully most people by now realize that if something is shared, it's no longer secret), but I think it does give a false sense of control.
As to your point about salons - this is my experience with Facebook groups as well. FB is a terrible medium for discussion, but apart from the UI/UX - it's where people can be found, and moderated groups can and do work rather well. And they basically work like you describe salons.
In the real world our informational transactions are largely determined by place, and we assume different roles by those. Home, work, gym, mosque, store, school, concert (performer or audience?), beach, etc. And how and who you (or others) are known varies -- the idea of single unitary identity is often quite absent.
Size of groups also matters hugely, and I think often of how dynamics change with scale. See the old Budapest String Quartet joke. Expertise, qualifications, and intent of participants also matters.
Simply mashing bodies into a room, not so much.
There doesn't seem to be a way of involving small groups of people in small discussions that don't require a lot of attention. Someone else mentioned D&D groups -- that's exactly my use case. I don't want to send out tons of email to my players about stuff they might not be interested in. I do want a place that I can dump interesting things that they can later choose to participate in, low attention kind of stuff. Making a G+ community for five people feels like overkill.
This could be perfect for that.
For smaller interests, a lot of people tend to use Google Hangouts - I'm in one with mostly people I know focused on the game Star Realms.
It's happened to more than two Slack groups I've been part of and they are both looking for a new platform.
If they keep unlimited message history that is going to be a really compelling feature.
Except everyone uses WhatsApp, because it doesn't have all that stuff - it's just simple. And everyone else is on it. Case in point - Telegram is kinda nice. Has some good features, and it's pretty simple. But I probably wouldn't have it installed, if it wasn't for the one group I need to use it with. Literally everyone else I converse with daily with through WhatsApp. My friends, my colleagues, my relatives, my parents.
Trying to persuade anyone to try something new is hard. Trying to get my parents to use something new, and then trying to explain how to set up an account, what this does, what that does - just not going to happen. Especially if everyone else is using something else.
But good luck to Google, I look forward to giving it a try :-)
They are both great and with modern smartphones having both installed is no problem.
Whatsapp is a bit more secure by default it seems and Telegram keeps adding and improving features monthly it seems.
I love both of them and have my inlaws on T and my stubborn family on W.
If I want to bring together a group of people, I have lots of options, from very structured - "I have a Facebook group for the sports team / political campaign I run and want to share information with players, get them to do things" - to the very ad hoc "I have a group of buddies who I get together with once in a while and to save time we've got a WhatsApp group." Both of these work well because they're linked with something I use all the time anyway - Facebook and WhatsApp. If I want to connect with random people on subjects I care out, there are subreddits.
The use case for this, on the other hand, is what? "I'm going to use a specific service that I'm going to have to persuade all of my friends to use, with no real added benefit?". I just don't get it.
Are you sure?
Edit:
Think study groups, DnD sessions, or other document-collaboration type use cases. Facebook does not make that particularly easy, and how mature is Facebook's enterprise support? Facebook For Work is much less of a sure thing than their personal offerings.
People already use the heck out of Google Docs for collaboration, this provides a bit of formality and structure to that collaboration. Before, Docs sharing was a bit of a Docs + Hangouts + informal process around discussion. Now it's... whatever this does.
I'm excited to see how this works out. I'm using Docs collaboration to help plan a trip I'm going on in a few months, I might try to use this to enhance that collaboration.
This could become a big deal if true and possibly rival Twitter for when you suddenly have an interest in something for a few hours/days but want to drop out later.
Since they say its "rolling out...for all Gmail accounts", that certainly makes it sound like its tied to an account (specifically a Gmail account).
Unrelated, assuming there is some storage limit to each space, be funny to get an error, "Your space is out of space."
In reference to all the 'Google will kill this soon' posts. I agree there seems to be a growing list of discontinued products but their Takeout [1] service almost always lets you get your content out. While things like social interactions on G+ might hold value on the platform itself, as long as I have my notes/photos/data at the end of the day, I am happy to treat these products like I would a text editing app, just a tool to work with the data.
I mean it's an interesting concept though it takes me out of my normal flow of using a web browser or getting my news through various apps so I can't see how I would ever get a chance to use it. I like how it's a more integrated experience, however. Good integrations always trump multiple apps as far as usability is concerned.
Btw I love the lack of self awareness with the blog entry.
> Group sharing isn’t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging.
So here is yet another app to get your friends into!
- Sidewiki - Seems similar to Genius, as it's becoming, where you can annotate any site.
- Jaiku - Micro-blogging and life-streaming, apparently comparable to twitter, founded a month before Twitter was founded, launched the same month Twitter launched.
- Dodgeball - Like Foursquare. It's founder left to form foursquare.
I'm sure there's more in there.
1: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects
But to me Spaces seem to take the usual too complicated approach from google. Making a new text post is two clicks away before you can start typing? Both Google search and youtube get more prominent positions then text when creating posts. They call it a group sharing service, so maybe they did the right thing and maybe this is what their mvp should be.
Feature requests:
- Events, and add to users calendar if they rsvp.
- Integration with google docs. And let it sync/control the permissions from within the spaces app.
Are there actually people at the company that never use Hangouts?
Remember when Hangouts was supposed to be the one chat service to rule them all?
That's what I used to use Google+ for... sharing personal stuff with small group (i.e. family)
then they rebuilt the photo albums from G+ as Google Photos, regressed all the features, and redesigned G+, regressing the photo sharing story even further
I don't know wtf they're trying to do at Google but it seems after G+ failed to dislodge Facebook they don't know what to do and just make everything worse
Per the announcement, Spaces is enabled for all Gmail accounts at launch. Gmail doesn't require invites. Therefore, Spaces doesn't require invites.
Think they learnt their lesson that invite only no longer builds hype with the G+ launch.
I may try it for sharing stuff with close family - stuff I wouldn't share on facebook because the context is too personal. Finding myself emailing and texting people in too many environments lately, if they can keep my stuff private (and I don't mean get ads for furniture if I share a funny video about ikea private), it might work.
Won't be using it because it's not a core part of Google and so at a high risk of being cancelled. Also noone else is using it (yeah yeah, I know, but that's not my problem) and i don't do unpaid Google evangelism.
Edit: seems like I'm not the only one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4jlgxg/introducing...
There's lots of UX issues with existing group-shared-content solutions that could be addressed, but until we actually see this I'm not sure what it offers new in the space.
I'm not sure how Google Spaces is different from Google+ Communities, this is confusing
Rooms died for the reasons many others are mentioning here - why would you use a new app, when the functionality (kinda) exists between FB groups, Whatsapp, Messenger?
I'm not sure if this will have a web client, but if it does maybe this can be a group-based Pocket / Pinboard competitor?
Even FB has given up the "one app to rule them all" approach to social, and Google was never very good at that.
That's precisely what they did before Google+, though.
This could be useful for people who boycott or otherwise have no use for social networks. I'm not sure how big that market really is, but my own parents come to mind, plus some curmudgeonly old friends who only do email.
Another Google experiment that will run its course and either succeed or be relegated to the attic which is full of interesting but unsuccessful ideas. I'm glad someone's trying to think ahead of the curve and bypass the social networks, which are such a time sync for me at least.
Google seems to be trying to pivot G+ into small individual services focused on mobile first.
I find photos very useful after split from G+ though.
I'd be interested if focused more on sharing Drive content across personal and business accounts.
Everything will only disappear in a few years time, including you.
I don't see why this is any more likely with a Google project than a similar project from any other firm (a Google project is more likely to be discontinued while Google is still a going concern than offerings most other firms, but only because Google is likely to be around longer as a company.)
Google's strategy to discontinue services comes with natural consequences. One of those consequences is it burns bridges with certain types of early adopters and creates distrust when those early adopters complain in popular forums like Hacker News.
UPDATE: It may be in Google's best interest to start publically committing to a service's life span and support to preemptively address the leftover feelings of abandonment from other discontinued services.
Exactly that, IMO. Arguably, people who voice their negative opinions are doing Google a favour by at least trying to draw attention to the problem.
It's entirely up to Google as to which products they create, operate and terminate. I've no argument with their right to do whatever they want in that respect - it's their time, money and resources which are being expended. But equally, it's users' time and effort being sunk in to discovering a product, learning about it, integrating it into their lives and using it. There are only so many instances of being jerked around that they'll tolerate before consciously swerving new products.
I think Keep is a pretty handy tool that's convenient and helpful. But I won't be using it. I relied on Notebook, until that was killed off. The lesson I took from seeing services being killed off that I or friends/colleagues used was that it's just a bit safer to use equivalent established services from dedicated providers. They might not be as tightly integrated with other Google services, but it's a trade-off I'll make for continuity's sake.
Or there's a very vocal minority of people here on Hacker News that are really upset about Reader being shut down and use any opportunity to mention about it. I highly doubt it's a majority of people who distrust Google products because they might get shut down at some point in the future.
I used to think that, but I found myself questioning using certain Google products because I questioned their long term viability, and I've never been the "victim" of any service shutdowns. It's not rational, but the thought was there and I suspect I'm not the only one.
UPDATE: Look at the number of posts where people joke how long it will take before it gets shut down. Google has effectively branded itself as a company that creates ill conceived social applications in a vacuum only to shut them down or superficially rebrand them 19 months later. They have an image problem.
For paid services, they often do this, its called the "deprecation policy".
For other services, they may not at launch. Then again, the complaints may be from a loud group on internet fora, but they may not represent, despite their loudness, a significant barrier to adoption in Google's experience, so addressing them may not be something worthwhile for Google to do.
You might be right, but I'd argue that measuring for this is probably trickier than it seems.
Complaints from loud groups may not initially represent quieter groups, but persistently loud groups have a tendency to shape the thinking of quieter people. Influence is usually slow and gradual at first, but with enough persistence, the message tends to sound more true over time. Repeated ideas tend to quickly overtake if nobody has a vested interest in challenging them. They become these subconscious truisms that people parrot when they hear keywords. By the time that's spread, it's probably too late.
The actual number of genuinely useful services that Google has shuttered is relatively small.
Their much bigger sin consists of either long-term neglect, re-launching a new version with half the features missing or as other commenters here have pointed out - launching something that confusingly overlaps with another service.
I'd also add that it raises a serious point: if we cannot depend on products to exist past the team that creates them, are we really producing products at all? Or merely engineering time leased at the rate you consume advertising?
Google Answers, Google Deskbar, Writely, Google Click-to-Call, Related Links, Public Service Search, Google Video Marketplace, Google Browser Sync (Firefox), Google Lively, Hello, SearchMash, Send to Phone, Audio Ads, Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Ride Finder, Shared Stuff, Google Page Creator, Marratech e-Meeting, GOOG-411, Google Labs, Google Buzz, Google Dictionary, Google PowerMeter, Real Estate, Google Directory, Squared, Google Sets, Google Pack, Google Fast Flip, Desktop, Google Image Labeler, Aardvark, Directory, Gears, Google Notebook, Google Apps standard edition, Google Code Search, Google Health, Google Website Optimizer, TV Ads, Google Friend Connect, Google Insights for Search, Knol, Google Wave, Picnik, Jaiku, Nexus Q, Slide.com, Google Mini, Picasa Web Albums Uploader, Google Cloud Connect (Microsoft Office plugin), Google Building Maker, Google Calendar Sync, Meebo, Google Reader, Google Latitude, Google Talk, SMS service, iGoogle, GIS tools for Google Maps, Google Schemer, Google Notifier, YouTube My Speed, Orkut, QuickOffice, "discussion search", Google Moderator, Wildfire by Google, BebaPay, Google Helpouts, Google Code, Picasa, Google Compare.
a. things that were obselete or dead in all but name. b. things that were merged into other things (for better or worse
- then the list becomes considerably smaller. Still. There's a few things on there I'd forgotten about and still rather miss.
Of course, real desktop apps goes against the need for all content to be in the Google cloud where it can be mined by Gooogle, so I'm not surprised. I guess Total Information Awareness makes for great ad sells.
Most of them were merged into other products, some were open-sourced.
I'd argue that most of them aren't witty[1] and it's not just Reader either. Plenty of things shut down before and afterwards[2].
[1]: Obviously not counting my own rapier wit...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...
"Genuinely useful" is a subjective term... Reader and the nontrivial list of other things Google has bought or started and then left to die on the vine definitely gives me pause before signing up for one of their services.
Example: They started doing domain registration about a year or two ago? I'm not going to use it because it's not a core part of their business and I don't want to be in the position of doing a forced migration with associated costs when they inevitably decide to scuttle it with no concern for the users.
Obligatory xkcd reference... sigh.
XKCD 927 should be considered harmful, as while it is true that's how things sometimes happen, to start quoting it everywhere is to try to shut down people from innovating, and that's anything but helpful.
Nexus Q might count.