Google has been getting quite some criticism lately for the fact that they are having too many apps for messaging. However, most likely you already forgot about Spaces, which will be closing down on April 17. It seems that Google is rushing with their spring cleaning, and perhaps on this occasion maybe they will become more focused on their messaging approach.
If you haven’t heard about it (probably not), Spaces represents the company’s attempt to organize conversations for small groups of people, centered on particular topics. It’s not really a texting and chatting app, but it’s in fact some sort of forum for small groups of people. It allowed you to choose a particular topic, invite your friends and coworkers to join the talk and then you could discuss it. The main attraction was the fact that it brought on automatically Google searches, images, you could also use YouTube videos and many other things you wanted to connect to your topic.
John Kilcline, who works as a product manager for Google, declared in a post published on Google+ (which might get soon involved in the spring cleaning too) that they decided to value their experience with Spaces and to use what they learned from it with other existing products. Most likely the app that will benefit the most from the Spaces experience is Allo, which has already been endowed with Google Assistant in order to gather information in real time for a conversation.
In fact, Spaces was a knock off from Rooms, an experimental app made by Facebook that got shut down in December 2015. As such, maybe an app that focuses on topics is not quite the thing for a large public right now. Spaces will become a read-only app in the future weeks and then it will shut down forever on April 17.
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