Google is known to have a little too many apps, and many of them are overlapping others that practically do the same thing. One of them is the Spaces app.
Introduced in May 2016, it's a cross-platform group messaging tool that allows users to post links, YouTube videos, photos and text in a shared environment, and discuss them with friends. It was Google's attempt to help small groups of people in organizing their conversation around specific topics where they can invite people to then discuss.
Its key feature is the ability to automatically pull in results from Google Search and other Google-related products.
However, it failed to get good traction. It failed to even get exposure needed to ever take off.
Google is shutting down the product, and people aren't expected to mourn over a product they never heard of.
As of March 3rd, Google changes Spaces to read-only mode. Users won't be able to create any new spaces, posts or comments. New invitations won't be sent and new members won't be added. And after April 17th, 2017, Google will remove Spaces and all of its contents for good.
Spaces failed to gather momentum because it's essentially a product that is trying to solve something that didn't really exist. Spaces can create a group chat in a preferred topics, and so could almost any other chat app in the market.
Using apps that are more solid and more established like for example, WhatsApp or Messenger, users can share contents easily.
Furthermore, Spaces that is seen as a knock of a Facebook experimental app, Rooms, also failed to improve what rival apps already offered, both in terms of reach and functionality. It neither added features that could really change how people use it, or help users in finding others who might be interested in installing it.
And what makes it really difficult to take off was also because Google has created Allo, a similar platform but more unique.
"We've decided to take what we learned with Spaces, and apply it to our existing products," said Google's product manager John Kilcline.