Google Spaces is a discontinued mobile app for group discussions and messaging developed by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. The app was intended to compete with Slack as a content sharing platform where users can create a "space", invite their friends for discussion, and share videos, images, text, and other media. Google services such as the web browser Chrome, search engine

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

, and video sharing platform

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

were built into the app to allow users to source content from them. Google Spaces launched on May 16, 2016, available on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

, Mac, Android, and

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operating systems. The app was discontinued on April 17, 2017. The Spaces brand name was revived for an unrelated feature in

Google Chat Google Chat (formerly known as Hangouts Chat) is a communication service developed by Google. Initially designed for teams and business environments, it has since been made available for general consumers. It provides direct message, group co ...

, formerly named Rooms.

History

On May 16, 2016, product director Luke Wroblewski announced the launch of Spaces as "a tool for small group sharing". On February 16, 2017, Google announced Spaces would be discontinued on April 17. On March 3, Google announced that users could only print, view and delete existing spaces within the app, users could no longer create new spaces.

Features

Spaces allowed group chatting and messaging between users. Users initiated conversations by creating a 'space' and then inviting friends to join. Once inside a 'space', there was a box at the bottom of the screen where one could tap buttons to post links and images and other content to the chat room. A conversational view let users see what the group was talking about. Google products such as Google Chrome,

, and

were in built into the app to allow users to find and share articles, videos, and images without leaving the app. It required a

account to sign up. The following were the types of posts that a user could share in a "space": * Links – URLs of media which are automatically embedded * Videos – YouTube videos were integrated for mobile users; however, desktop users could directly search in the YouTube database as well as see their recently watched videos * Photos – With support for multiple-image uploads, users could directly post through their camera roll or through

Google Photos Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun off from Google+, the company's former social network. As of June 1, 2021, in its free tier, any newly uploaded photo and video c ...

* Text – Plain text, without formatting support

References

{{Google LLC Collaborative software Spaces Spaces