The future of Currents and the next generation of collaboration in Spaces | Hacker News Reader

The future of Currents and the next generation of collaboration in Spaces

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

43 pointstaubek43 comments

I think I’ve reached peak apathy regarding googles products. If the title was “Google retires Gmail and Search” I still wouldn’t be surprised.

At this point the only surprising thing about a Google service is that it hasn’t already been retired.

We are a small startup, recently moved to Zoho from Google. Except of the Google calendar, we don't miss a thing. The experience with Zoho Work drive is even better for collaborative work. Though its CEO association with RSS annoys me a bit but eh!

> RSS

Might be worth disambiguating that for the HN crowd. I'm sure most people would assume you meant the syndication format. I certainly had to read it twice.

Is it this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh

Yes. It appears to be what GP meant.

At first, I thought this was about the Google Currents news aggregator app that competed with Flipboard, and had somewhat similar functionality to the modern 'Google' app.

But no, that was a different Currents which was killed a long time ago. This Currents is an enterprise communication app.

I do appreciate the irony that they had an old Currents.

At this point Google should name their messaging products with the engineer's name who got promoted for that project. How many messaging brands did Google create ? I can recall at least 6

Retroactively renaming Google plus to Gundotra+ does have a ring to it

Good. We have Currents at work. It seemed to be pushed on us, through being corporate G-suite (or whatever it's branded as now?) users. It's just not good. It's a n+1 information channel, but:

a) it isn't integrated into anything else (unless you subscribe to fill your email inbox with updates) meaning you either have to consciously remember to check it, or you miss out on a bunch of stuff that's shared there.

b) it doesn't have enough else as a 'draw' to make it into enough of an interesting social network to hook you into using it organically.

The book of Jeremiah had this to say about Google+:

  “They will not mourn for him:
    ‘Alas, my brother! Alas, my sister!’
  They will not mourn for him:
    ‘Alas, my master! Alas, his splendor!’

  He will have the burial of a donkey—
    dragged away and thrown
    outside the gates of Jerusalem.”

The new integrated view for Gmail looks promising. I run my company and team using Workspace and ClickUp, and Workspace was just not chat-friendly so far despite Rooms.

Can't wait for our account to move to the new version/design.

> The new integrated view for Gmail looks promising.

It's difficult to get excited about anything new from Google even if it's good. It's all disposable. Won't last. Eventually, they will replace it with something else. What they replace it with might be even better, or it might be worse. It's a Googlcoaster.

I've used Currents quite a lot few years ago. It had some content formatting issues that weren't there in Google+ but all in all it was a good service.

Makes sense, they're moving everything to Chat because people want everything in 1 place, >1 window is hard for normal people

A Google Chat service? Which one?

The next one, of course. It's always the next one.

They've consolidated mostly on https://chat.google.com. Hangouts is nearly dead (Starting a video call just sends a message with a Google meet link, and messaging is compatible with Chat so there's no barrier for switching) and Allo is dead and Talk is long dead. Basically the only things they have for chat now are Chat (basically a Slack clone), Messages (a SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android), and Voice (VoIP with SMS/MMS).

The one called Chat, that's why it was capitalised.

Workspace already solved that by embedding every app in the sidebar of every other app.

Espacially sinced a lot of people use their phone way more than their computer (if they have one), and multitasking on the phone is extra hard.

RIP Google+, for real this time I guess.

I think that at somepoint Google will find itself in a position TV stations found themselves in around 2008-ish; TV stations had created the habbit of cancelling everything that wasn't an instant hit in it's first season. In turn this became a self-fulfilling prophecy because people wouldn't watch the first season. They didn't want to be left out in the cold with some season 1 cliffhanger which was never resolved because the series never got renewed for a second season.

...AND YES I'M STILL PISSED ABOUT FIREFLY!

Currents (G+) is over 10 years old.

TV shows stopped doing season cliffhangers, which is good.

According to @killedbygoogle on twitter[1] it's not 10 years old.

[1] https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/149184004005339136...

Currents used to be "Google+ for G Suite" but Google+ shut down in 2019 so it was renamed to Currents at that time. I don't think it was over a decade old though, that sounds like a previous product also named Currents that was shutdown prior to Google+ for G Suite being a thing.

You might be thinking of the old Google Currents, which was a completely different product (a "digital newsstand" app) with the same name.

Netflix has certainly got into this position for me.

With Netflix I feel like it's the opposite even - you have to just force yourself to stop watching any of their originals after 2nd maybe 3rd season at most because it always, inevitably ends up deteriorating in quality massively. I don't know or even have a theory as to why that happens, but so far it has held true for me.

Here's my theory!

Perhaps the writers write the first season fully aware of the probability that they won't be asked to write a second. Then, when it's a surprise hit, they are less sure of what to do following the events of the first.

AFAIK, Netflix decided that they only were going to make 2-3 seasons at most, and only locked up talent for that long. Therefore, some behind the scenes changes after season 2-3.

I don't know whether that's still their assumption.

This issue will impact Netflix as well. During lockdown I watched a few series that were at season one only, and a lot didn't get renewed. Now I only select series with at least two seasons.

Almost as bad is when they blink at the contract table and move some franchise to another streaming provider while you're in the middle of watching it.

+1 for Firefly. At least they kind of finished it with the movie. I'll always be a browncoat.

Currents is still alive? Mighty nice of Google. Don't think anyone would have noticed its absence.

Never even heard of it.

It was kind of meant to be an intranet, but they got to releasing v1 and then seemingly never really developed it any further.

> but they got to releasing v1 and then seemingly never really developed it any further.

Except for the core pieces, this is a distressing description of most google products.

It's just the dregs of Google+ with a UI redesign and a rebrand, only available for GSuite customers.

It made it to the list already - https://killedbygoogle.com/

Well fuck that’s a huge pile of corpses.

Reading through that site it’s amazing the amount of weird random stuff Google does.

There’s the ‘throw stuff at the wall’ product strategy, and then there’s the ‘no strategy at all’ strategy.

I mean ‘Google Bookmarks - a web-based bookmarking service not integrated with any other Google services’. I know this one’s an outlier as it’s old for a Google product, but if it’s not integrated then why bother?

Part of me thinks it’s because they’ve got a lot of people and an near infinite amount of money and there’s only so many people you can throw at sticking ads everywhere, so everyone else has got to do something.

Might as well write another messaging app.

This list is so long that they should consider summarising it at the top; a graph tracking new production introductions vs retirements, so that we can see whether Google is getting any better at creating lasting products.

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