Google is shuttering its experimental group messaging app slash content-sharing platform Spaces on April, the Alphabet-owned company has now confirmed.
Google Spaces
It's safe to say that a large number of people haven't even heard of it or stopped using the service altogether — otherwise it wouldn't be headed for a shutdown. Google is known to create a number of messaging apps across a number of platforms, and it can easily get confusing, Spaces, however, was slightly nuanced.
What Was Spaces For?
Spaces was a slight cut above the rest in the way it focused on small groups of people who wanted to discuss specific topics, letting them have a "space" to share photos, links, and other content. A user can set a topic, invite people over, and ensue conversations. The predominant feature was the ability to pull Google searches, images, YouTube videos, and so on.
John Kilcline, a Google product manager, confirmed the shutdown on Google+, saying that the company has decided cut the service off and taking what it's learned and integrating it into other products. One of those products seems to be Allo, the company's messaging platform complete with Assistant features.
"As we focus our efforts, we've decided to take what we learned with Spaces, and apply it to our existing products," said Kilcline. "We want to thank all of the Spaces users who tried out the app and shared their feedback. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
How To Save Your Content Before The Service Ends
For the rare ones who treated Spaces as a part of their everyday productivity tool, here are a few important details to keep in mind: all content posted on the service will start being read-only on March 3, which means no new spaces, comments, posts can be created starting that day. New invitations will also be disabled, and new members will be barred from further entering spaces.
Before the service shuts down, which happens on April 17, users of Spaces can see, save, or print content; delete any spaces left, leave spaces joined, or remove people from spaces; report abuse in Spaces, or block other Spaces users.
After April 17, Spaces will officially be killed a la Google Wave. Poof, nada. All contents will be deleted. It's still uncertain when exactly Google plans to subsume features from Spaces into its other messaging apps, although with Allo potentially heading to desktop, that integration might come sooner than later.
Google isn't a stranger to killing some of its apps, although the shutdown of Spaces came too soon, just less than a year, as noted by VentureBeat. Last month Google killed the classic Google+ outfit following a redesigned experience. That style dates back 2012.
For dedicated Spaces users who find it particularly displeasing that the service is ending, feel free to sound off in the comments section below! For those who haven't even heard about it can move along.
Good riddance, Spaces. 'Twas fun while it lasted.
