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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what, if any value this adds.

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.

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AFAICT, Google's current strategy is, on a plane of the social and chat axes, put one product at every integral (x,y) coordinate.

> with no real added benefit?

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.

From my understanding, Spaces doesn't require any kind of membership anywhere. No accounts.

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.

> Spaces doesn't require any kind of membership anywhere. No accounts.

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).

Ah, I stand corrected.

Because of how much of Google's business relies on tracking people's movements across devices, there's almost no chance that this will not be tied to a Google account. Google has no interest in building a Twitter killer per se.

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