Google Spaces

» see spaces.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

by the time google spaces launched i was not paying enough attention to google's small-group experiments to install another one. it shipped on 16 may '16 across mobile and web. eleven months later it was gone.

the app was led by luke wroblewski, a designer with a public personal brand. the pitch was a clean replacement for "send my friends a link" plus comments and search inside each space. the chrome integration acted as an instant-share button. youtube embeds and an inline google search did the rest of the work.

the problem was that the spaces it asked you to create were empty until you invited people, and inviting people meant convincing them to install another google app. slack at the time was eating the small-team-chat market for paid workspaces. whatsapp was already locked in for friend-group threads. google spaces had no obvious territory between them.

google announced the shutdown on 16 february '17, three months after kicking off a quiet maintenance phase. the app pulled from the play store and app store on 17 april '17. the brand got recycled later inside google chat for the rooms / spaces feature, which is its own different product. the original '16 google spaces left no surviving feature and no exported data. the shutdown post itself was the only documentation that outlasted the app.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the eleven months ~

may '16 launch with press coverage. by summer the rollout across mobile and web was done and the press cycle had cooled. by fall the team had stopped shipping features without saying so publicly, and by december most of the senior folks had moved to other google projects. the february '17 announcement and april '17 shutdown were the formal end of a product that had been quietly dying since november.

luke wroblewski himself stayed at google after the shutdown and kept working on chrome and android product design. he did not write a public obituary for spaces. the team's internal memory of the project went into the bin with the play store listing.

~ what it became ~

the brand "spaces" came back in '21 inside google chat as the workspace-style group rooms. that product is unrelated in code and team to the '16 google spaces. the chat spaces are server-rooms for office teams who already have google workspace. the '16 google spaces was a friend-group sharing app for consumers. the brand recycle is a coincidence at most. the '16 product left nothing else.

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